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Napoleone di Buonaparte. 

By Brev. Maj.-Gen. J. Watts de Peyster. 



Reprinted from the "College Student," Lancaster, Pa. 




/. WATTS DE PEYSTER, 

Lilt. D. (iSp2), LL. D. {i8g6), Franklin mid Marshall College ; 
LL. D. Nebraska College, {i8yo) ; M. A. Columbia College, or 
University . Brevet Major-Ge7ieral, N. Y. Awarded the^Gold 
Medal of i8gi by the " Society of Lette7's, Science and Art," Lon- 
don, England, "For Literary and Scientific Attainments" {of 
which Society he is Honorary Fellow or Member). 



75 



Years. 




NAPOLEONE Dl BUONAPARTE. 



BY THE AUTHOR OF 



"THE REAL NAPOLEON BONAPARTE,' 



^ J. -WATTS DE PEYSTER, ^ 

Brevet Major -General, New York, "with Rank from 20th April, 1863" ("for Meritorious Services rendered to the 

National Guard and to the United States prior to and during the Rebellion," by "Concurrent 

Resolution" or Special Law, 95th April, 1866.) 

M. A. Columbia College, LL. D. Nebraska College 1870, Litt. D. 1892 and LL. D. 1896 Franklin 

and Marshall College, Life Member of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain, 

Honorary Fellow of the Society of Science, Letters and Art of London 1893, 

and awarded their Gold Medal for 1894 for Scientific and Literary 

Attainments, Member of the Maatschappig der Nederland- 



T^ ische Letterkunde, Leyden, Holland, 



&c. &c. &c. 



-^^JO^ 



B'/ 



41^ 



D 



LANCASTER, PA. : 

Reprinted by the "College Student," Franklin and Marshall College. 

1896. 

COPYRIGHT. 1896, BY J. WATTS de PEYSTER. 



Napoleone di Buonaparte, 

' ' Flagellum Dei. " — ' ' hmtiinentia Peccaiomm Flagella . ' ' 

THE MODERN ATTILA. 



" I wovJd not be the villain 
For the whole space that's in the Tyrant's grasp, 
And the rich East to boot." 

— Shakspere's Macbeth — Title Page. 

QUOTED IN COXE'S "EXPOSE), OR NAPOLEON 
BUONAPARTE UNMASKED," 1809. 

"This Napoleone de Buonaparte, 
who once styled himself Brutus Buona- 
parte.^ citoyen sans culotte ! breathed his 
first innocent air in Corsica,"* and con- 
tinued to be nothing more in character 
but a Corsican to his life's end. 

" The dawn of this great tnan'' s stern and 
inflexible disposition first displayed itself 
at Toulon, where he had the appointment 
of chef- de-brigade, when so much mischief 
was done to the inhabitants of that city 
after the British had retreated ; and when, 
under a deceitful proclamation, those who 
were deemed disaffected or suspected only, 
were assembled on the Champ de Mars, to 
the number of 1,500, and there butchered. 
This exploit he authenticated by his mem- 
orable letter to the Deputies who were sent 
to the different armies by the Convention, 
when, under the assumed name of Brutus 
Buonaparte, he stated that 'upon the 

*NoTE. — In reverting to the first mode in which 
Napoleone Buonaparte spelt his name, it is mentioned 
that that orthography has-been adhered to from motives 
of propriety. Though Buonaparte, when in Egypt, 
chose to drop the final letter in Napoleone, and discard 
the second letter of his surname, to familiarize the 
sounds and render them more closely analogous to the 
French idiom, he cannot prevent them from sinking 
wholly into oblivion. — Co:>:e's Expose, p. 20. 



field of glory, his feet imi?idated with the 
blood of traitors, he announced, with a 
heart beating with joy, that their orders 
were executed and France revenged ; that 
neither sex nor age had beeji spared ; and 
that those who escaped, or were only mu- 
tilated by the discharge of the republican 
cannon, were dispatched by the swords of 
liberty and the bayonets of equality.' "* 

At page 855, Vol. IV, Dr. Leo gives the 
original French of this letter or report, 
which Buonaparte's friends deny, alleging 
he was an angel of mercy instead of an 
angel of murder. 

Dr. Heinrich L,eo, in his lyehrbuch der 
Universalgeschichte,Vol. IV, 85i,*givesthe 
synonyms and meaning of Napoleone — "to 
become a word of terror to all Europe" — 
Neapolio, Nepoluccio, tracing it back to the 
famous old Germdi-aNibelung^ and concludes 
that this last fitly descended and belonged 
to a man who was an out-and-out Nibelung, 
(whether the author means by this a mali- 
cious dwarf, a grizzly spectre [Popanz], or 
a blasting fog, the writer cannot determine), 
and a Todesdorn — Sting of Death, or Death 
Inflicter. 



*NoTE. — The reader in following the narrative, it is 
imagined, will observe, that from this massacre at 
Toulon, and through the long and frightful round of 
enormities committed by Buonaparte, or by his com- 
mand, extending to the massacre at Madrid, one fero- 
cious principle only has actuated his conduct ; and 
thus accustomed to the shedding of human blood, it 
may, without exaggeration, be said of him that 



Napolbone di Buonaparte. 



To this — the Reign of Terror and re- 
sulting bloodshed — Buonaparte with his 
wars of confiscations and extortions was a 
fit successor. 

Whoever may object to such a compari- 
son, unquestionably Attila, the Hun (A. D. 
433-453), was a perfect type of Buona- 
parte in every particular, and the stu- 
dent who will study the type and paradigm, 
will discover how they and their careers 
complement each other. Both were 
"Scourges of God" — Attila for about 
nineteen years ; Buonaparte for exactly 
the same space of time, 1796-1815. Nor 
were their strategy and tactics dissimilar. 



"Direness, familiar to his slanght'rons thoughts, 
Cannot once start him !" 

Again : Wherever atrocities could be committed, 
whenever devastation could take place, like the demon 
of evil, he was ready to direct the storm. In his route 
to Pavia he set fire to the village of Beuasco, which he 
owned himself was a horrid sight, and gave orders to 
set even the city of Pavia in flames ; but the timely 
appearance of the French garrison, which had been 
shut up in the castle, prevented that dreadful catastro- 
phe from taking place ; for had the blood of a single 
Frenchman been spilled, he would have erected, he 
declared, a column, on which should have been in- 
scribed ' ' Here Pavia stood. " He demanded of the city 
two hundred hostages, to be sent to France, and then 
calmly ordered the whole municipality to be shot, as a 
salutarj' example, as his dispatches mentioned, for the 
observation of Italy at large. After the battle of Salo, 
on the Lake da Guarda— human nature shudders at the 
bare recital of the deed— he commanded all who, from 
severe wounds, were deemed unfit for service, to be 
mingled with the dead, which were to be conveyed 
away in wagons, and to be then strangled, or suffo- 
cated under them, and then thrown into an extensive 
pit prepared for the purpose and covered with 
quicklime ! Several of these unhappy people, not 
having life quite extinguished in them, the lime 
coming in contact with their green wounds, were 
suddenly roused into an excruciating sense of their 
situation ; and the dreadful screams which were 
uttered, till the ground was finally closed on their suf- 
ferings, so affected the humane rector of Salo that he 
died from the horror which had seized him on hearing 
their cries. — Coxe's Expost. 

It is mentioned in Adolphus's History of France 
that so early as the year 1794 the number of French 
who fell by various means of destruction — on the scaf- 



Victory was purchased with life, not by 
science. 

Whoever is unprejudiced and will study 
up the statistics of Buonaparte's wars — 
not in French authorities, for they are too 
often altogether untrustworthy, but in such 
compilations as those of von Kausler — the 
student will find that it was scarcely won- 
derful that succeeding to the command of 
the finest classes of experienced officers of 
every grade, as well as enthusiastic troops, 
he was so successful at first. 

Consuming these without mercy, and 
acquiring greater and more extensive pow- 
er, he could sweep in hundreds of thou- 



fold, in the waves, and on the field by the hands ot 
their countrj'meu — is estimated at 900,000 ; of whom 
15,000 were women, 22,000 children ; and that more 
than 20,000 dwellings had been destroyed. — Coxe''s 
Expose. 

Since that period [the 'capture of Toulon and sub- 
sequent massacre], and during Buonaparte's career, the 
destruction of the human species, in battles, sieges, 
naval combats, executions, military vengeance, massa- 
cres, pestilence, and other attendant consequences of 
twelve additional years of war and devastation in and 
out of the kingdom, and including the war of extermi- 
nation in I,a Vendee and St. Domingo — the calculation 
of 2,000,000 of lives must be deemed very far within 
the compass of a fair statement, than an overcharge. 
The individual who sacrifices his life for the benefit of 
the many is a character above all praise ; but to allow 
for a single moment that the many are to be sacrificed 
for the benefit of the few ; that is, that the good which 
may be done in the future, and whicli can never com- 
pensate for the mischief of the past, will justify the 
means of so attaining that good, is a species of philoso- 
phical calculation far be3'ond the conception of the 
writer's reasoning faculties. Two centuries of the 
severest despotism, under the most despotic monarchs 
France ever knew, would not have produced a hun- 
dredth part of the mischief which republican despotism 
accomplished from the conmiencement of the French 
Revolution, even to the year 1794, "covering the 
world with blood, with tears, and with calamities." 
When the Bastile was destroyed there were not three 
persons confined within its w!ills ; but France became 
afterwards, by her own act, one continued bastile ; the 
Place de Greve was extended over the surface of her 
soil, and the whole nation became in a manner execu- 
tioners against one another. — Coxe^s Expost. 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



sands of conscripts each year, but gradu- 
ally had to rely on levies less and less ac- 
climated to war. Still utterly regardless of 
sacrificing his best and bravest, and con- 
tinuing to use up all his accessible forces, 
the end had to come sooner or later — to lose 
ground daily from the very exhaustion of 
the human fuel which he continued to pour 
relentlessly into the furnace of war. In no 
period of his career did he win by scientific 
generalship — Moreau and others declared 
he ruined the Art of War — but by what in 
political life would be demagogism, by 
appeals to the interests and cupidity in 
every sense of those whom he could not 
compel to serve his purposes, if the other 
appeals failed.* 

Take for instance those "Infernal Col- 
umns," which inflicted such horrible mis- 
eries in gleaning the unwilling or re- 
fractory when the harvests of conscripts, 
levied with wicked injustice, had either 
failed or had been incompletely gathered. 
Never let it be forgotten, Buonaparte's 
blackguard and inhuman declaration, which 
is in no place literally quoted — when Met- 
ter nich called his attention to the unhappy 
•youth, unfit for military service, who filled 

his ranks — that "he on the lives of 

200,000 men." 

In exactly the same sense that Attila was 
styled the original " Scourge of God," with 
equal truth Buonaparte may be thus desig- 
nated the modern Scourge of God-f Their 



* " He [Buonaparte] understands enough of mankind 
to dazzle the weak, to dupe the vain, overawe the tim- 
id, and to make the wicked his instruments, but be- 
yond all this Buonaparte is grossly and totally igno- 
rant." "Napoleon's Last Voyages," London and Phil- 
adelphia, 1S95, quoting MioT' s Mejfioirs 'de I' ^'Expe- 
dition en Egypte. 

t Note.— Fi,AGEl.LUM Dei. As this term has led to 
erroneous interpretations, it would be wiser to trans- 
late it God's Scourge, just as Isaiah styles the Assyrian 
the rod of His anger and the staff of His indignation. 

Do ordinary readers actually imagine what was a 
Fi,AGEl.l,UM, It was not only an instrument of terri- 



careers lasted about as long and had just 
about the same termination as that of the 
great Hun. Attila' s invasion of Gaul was 
about equivalent to Bounaparte's Moscow 
campaign. Attila was not actually defeated 
disastrously at Chalons, but the moral effect 
was the same. His subsequent campaigns 
were not the successes previously achieved. 
The Hunnish king did not personally have 
a Waterloo, but immediately after his death 
his sons and his Huns did experience such 
a cataclysm on the Netad — " the great plain 
between the Drave and the Danube" — 
where their power was broken forever. 
Moscow may be said to have been the 
Chalons of Buonaparte. When the fa- 
mous Fre.nch engineer. General Haxo, 
saw Moscow bursting into flame he said 
to the Baron L,ejeune, "This must lead 
soon to our having to defend Paris." 
(Lejeune, 222.) Knox, in his famous 
" Races of Men," styles Buonaparte's grand 
army which perished in Russia " an army 
or horde of disciplined savages." "Hol- 
land [purest Anglo-Saxon], too, would have 
risen," " in their last struggle for liberty " 
[1848?] ; but she remembered the Celtic 
treachery ; the betrayal of the cause of lib- 
erty by the French Celt in '92 [how true !]; 
THE PLUNDER OF EUROPE BY A BODY OF 

DISCIPLINED SAVAGES under Napoleon ; 
so she responded not to the Celt." P. 55. 
" The Races of Men^^^ by Robert Knox, 
M. D. , Corresponding Member of the Na- 
tional Academy of Medicine, &c. , L,ondon, 
1850. 



ble punishment, but of absolute torture. It was a 
scourge, "a dreadful instrument," not with a single 
lash, but triple and sometimes more. " It was knotted 
with bones or heavy indented circles of bronze, or ter- 
minated by hooks, in which case it was aptly denomi- 
nated a scorpion." It bruised, it tore, it cut and it 
could eviscerate. It is a term most applicable to Buo- 
naparte. He was a bandit, a robber, a ravisher, a thief, 
and his brothers, except Louis, in one line or the other, 
no better than their leader. New York's Tweed might 
have taken a lesson from Lucien. 



Napolrone di Buonaparte. 



If the following anecdotes related by Gen. 
Baron Lejeune are absolutely true, it will 
go to prove that Attila's Huns could not 
have been more barbarous savages — 
although worse than our Apaches — than 
some of those under Buonaparte, as re- 
lated by lycjeune (271-2). 

"At Croupi (26th November, 1812), in an 
inn, assigned as quarters to Marshal Davout, 
under the thatch, in the manger, three in- 
fants were discovered, one hardly more 
than a year old and the others scarcely more 
than just born. Their clothes were those 
of the poor. They were benumbed with 
cold and remained silent. * * * j 
begged the Marshal's steward to give them 
a little soup, if he could make any, and 
did not occupy myself farther about them. 
Soon the warmth of the horses' breaths 
awakened these little creatures and their 
plaintive cries resounded for a long time 
throughout the rooms in which we were 
huddled together. * * * At 2 A. M. 
we were told that the village was in flames. 
Our isolated house was the only one intact, 
and the children still cried ; but at the mo- 
ment of departure, a little before day, they 
cried no longer. I asked the steward what 
he had done for them, and this man, who 
did not suffer less than we did, assuming 
the satisfied air of one who believes he had 
done a good deed answered, 'I could not 
shut an eye; their cries pierced my heart ; 
I had no nurse to give them ; then I took 
an axe; I broke the ice of the watering- 
place, or drinking trough, and I drowned 
them to put an end to their sufferings. To 
\what a degree can misfortune debase the 
human heart." 

G. Bertin, in his "Campagne de 1812," 
a wonderful collection of the testimony of 
eye witnesses, cites the above. 

" For a long time our soldiers were re- 
duced to feeding upon horseflesh. To such 
a degree had famine and misery brutified 
them, that these unfortunate creatures did 



not wait until the animal was dead to cut 
off the eatable parts. As soon as a horse 
tottered and fell no attempt was made to 
get him on his feet again, but immediately 
the soldiers precipitated themselves upon 
him to rip open the flank and tear out the 
liver, which is the least repulsive portion, 
and even without having taken the trouble 
to kill him previous to such torture, they 
seemed, I say, to become irritated at the 
final efforts which the animal was making 
to escape from his slaughterers, and they 
were heard to cry out with fury, while 
striking the beast, ' Rascal, wretch, can 
you not then remain quiet.'" (L,ejeune, 

249-50-) 

In a work examined before this article was 
written, "A complete picture of Napoleon 
and the French people," from the German, 
1806, Buonaparte's army of Italy is com- 
pared to "a horde of banditti," and the 
author adds, " He suffered them to commit 
ravages and excesses such as even the most 
barbarous ages since Attila have never been 
committed against a friendly and a submit- 
ting people." 

General Baron IvCJeune published some 
time since a volume, entitled "de Valmy . 
a Wagram," and now, in October, 1895, his 
second volume appeared, " En Prison et 
en Guerre — a travers 1' Europe (1809-1814). 
In this last above quoted he corroborates in 
a great many particulars the statement of 
Colonel Pion des Loches in regard to the 
Russian campaign, which I translated and 
which was printed in the Golden Magazitie. 

General Lejeune, brave and able as he 
proved throughout his military career, 
which was terminated by the bursting of a 
shell at Hanau, in 1813, was equally dis- 
tinguished as a painter of battle-scenes, an 
art to which he devoted himself after his 
last wound. In the narration of the events 
of which he was an eye witness, he was 
likewise very interesting, although in his, 
as in Marbot's narratives, the French 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



always had the best of it in fighting, and 
their stories always leave their readers won- 
dering how under such circumstances the 
Allies ever got possession at last of Paris. 

This reminds one of the astonishment of 
the Georgia farmer when Sherman was 
"picnicking " through his native state. Re- 
lieved of all his expletives his remarks 
about amount to this : '' For about four years 
we-uns have heard nothing but we-uns 
licking you-uns, and I can't get it through 
my wool how you-uns, after being so tarna- 
tion badly whipped, are down here, camped 
on my farm, killin' my hogs, eatin' my ba- 
con, swillin' my sorghum, diggin' up my 
sweet petaters and burnin' my fence rails." 

These visible and sensible facts consti- 
tuted an aggregated argumentum ad hoiiii- 
nem to which all his Southern bragging- 
could find neither explanation nor contra- 
diction nor excuse. 

Two phases in the career of Buonaparte 
have been dwelt upon with more admiration 
on the part of his friends and more aston- 
ishment and disgust on the part of philoso- 
phers and opponents than the servile adu- 
lation paid to the Corsican upstart by the 
oldest nobility and monarchs of Continental 
Europe. The assemblages at Tilsit in 1807, 
•at Urfurt in 1809, and at Dresden in 1813, 
were simply repetitions of " the crowd of 
vulgar kings, besides sagacious and virtu- 
ous sovereigns, which bowed before the 
throne of Attila, ranged in submissive or- 
der, watching his nod, trembling at his 
frown, and obedient without hesitation." 
(Gibbon, iii, 392.) Among these kings there 
were sovereigns who were equal at that pe- 
riod in dignity to the Czar of Russia, the 
Emperor of Austria, and King of Prussia. 
If Buonaparte did not slay his own brother, 
as Attila is charged with having done, he 
certainly murdered the Duke d'Enghien, a 
prince as exalted in character, race and po- 
sition with Bleda. Moreover, if the Empe- 
ror of Austria gave his best beloved child to 



that same upstart, who had repudiated his 
lawful wife without a legal divorce, Hono- 
oria, the sister of the Emperor Valentinian, 
was willing to deliver her person into the 
arms of a barbarian, of whose language she 
was ignorant — Marie Louise understood 
French imperfectly — whose religion and 
manners she abhorred. 

Attila was a predestinarian and Napoleon 
was a believer in Fate, or such other term 
as may be applied to the doctrine of "What 
must be, will be." This doctrine, which 
is the only explanation of the operation 
and effects of Unchangeable, Inflexible 
and Inexorable Daw, can alone account for 
the rise, progress and fall of such excep- 
tional characters or prodigies 01 combined 
capacity and crime as Buonaparte, and this 
law is as certain as those laws which regUr 
late the eccentric circuits of comets not 
always possible to be foreseen and cal- 
culated, but still regulated by the same 
decree which governs the certain orbits 
of the planets. Napoleon declared that 
he appeared out of time, because the world 
was no longer adapted to the full develop- 
opment of a man of his character ; but the 
fact is, at no time, except the period in 
which he appeared, could he have so risen 
and so thriven. It was as necessary for him 
to succeed the Reign of Terror, because, to 
use the liomely adage, "set a thief to catch 
a thief," none but a criminal of his calibre 
could have grappled with such a seething 
and surging condition of crime. No mor- 
tal actuated by virtue could have controlled 
the millions steeped in vice and totally re- 
gardless of the controlling interests of reli- 
gion, principle, or morality, with such expo- 
nents and examples as Barras, Fouche, Tal- 
leyrand, and hundreds of others, who soon 
became the supporters, advisers and ex- 
ecutives of Buonaparte. Even those 
who still possessed or professed a deference 
to virtue were soon converted by interest 
into subservient instruments or will-less 



NapoIvEone di Buonaparte. 



flatterers. Yea, even those considered the 
best of the crowd will not bear close scru- 
tiny, for Caulincourt, in the eyes of the true 
and honest, cannot cleanse his vesture of 
the stain of his connection with that most 
atrocious crime, the murder of the Duke 
d'Enghien and Duroc, however notable as 
faithful and devoted to his master, is charged 
with having known no conscience but that 
master's will. Even Macdonald, generally 
accepted as immaculate, was published by 
the German (Arndt, 93) as " having stolen 
and plundered like a common Knecht^'''' and 
the General Intendant, Dumas, "believed 
by many Germans as one inspired by a 
nobler soul was stained by many traces of 
his associates." 

Charras, in his "1813" (17), testifies 
Buonaparte "used his victory over Prussia 
without generosity, without justice, with- 
out pity." Attila, barbarian as he was, who 
flourished in the Dark Ages, exhibited more 
generosity and magnanimity than the mod- 
ern Attila, born at the period of the Ency- 
clopsedists and the light of the rising sun 
of mercy even to the speechless animals. 

The coincidences between Buonaparte 
and Attila are not confined to the duration 
and destructions of their careers. They 
resembled each other in size ; both were 
men of low stature, with full chests and 
short legs ; also in demeanor. Just as At- 
tila had a custom of fiercely rolling his 
eyes as if he wished to enjoy the terror 
which he inspired, Buonaparte got up fits 
of simulated rage for the same purpose. 
Both knew that success "must depend on a 
degree of skill with which the passions of 
the multitude were combined and guided 
for the service of a single man." 

As an instance of this perception of the 
influence of superstition, Gibbon tells us 
(iii, 390) : 

" One of the shepherds of the Huns per- 
ceived that a heifer, who was grazing, had 
wounded herself in the foot, and curiously 



followed the track of the blood till he dis- 
covered, among the long grass, the point of 
an ancient sword, which he dug out of the 
ground and presented to Attila. That mag- 
nanimous, or rather that artful, prince ac- 
cepted, with pious gratitude, this celestial 
favor ; and so the rightful possessor of the 
Sword of Mars asserted his divine and in- 
defeasible claim to the dominion of the 
earth." 

Just as the great Hun made the most of 
this simple superstition, Buonaparte resort- 
ed to similar discoveries, or rather inven- 
tions, to stimulate the confidence and 
enthusiasm of the French, as volatile and 
vain as those barbarians. 

During the period when Buonaparte was 
menacing England he visited Boulogne, and 
omens were resorted to for exciting and 
keeping up the enthusiasm of the troops. 
When the earth was removed to drain it or 
prepare it for Buonaparte's tent, it was pre- 
tended that a Roman battle-axe was found, 
which was converted into a portent of the 
success of the pending expedition, designed 
to rival that of Caesar into Britain. Med- 
als of William the Conqueror were also 
produced as having been dug up upon the 
same spot. What was this find but a type 
of the Normans' conquest and a victory 
more glorious than that of Hastings? 
(Scott, iv, 297-298.) 

It is very difficult to believe that a rusted 
sword, found by accident, should be adopt- 
ed, even by barbarian people, as a symbol 
of the deity ; but how much more, that 
within the century a people considered as 
highly enlightened should desire to build a 
temple to a living man and consecrate his 
SWORD. Nevertheless the words of the 
high authority who makes the statement 
which follows, clinches the parallel set forth 
between Buonaparte and Attila. P. Bon- 
dois. Professor of History in the Lyceum 
Buffon, and also Moliere, in his "Napo- 
leon and Society in His Time" (1793-1821), 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



Paris, 1895, Chapter VII, "Vassal Europe," 
Page 187, reads thus : 

"Among the official corps the Napoleonic 
enthusiasm approached delirium, after the 
peace of Presburg. The- Tribunate pro- 
posed to reestablish in his favor the ancient 
triumph, to raise a temple to him in Paris, 
TO CONSECRATE THE SWORD WHICH HE 
WORE AT AUSTERLITZ. ' ' 

"No wonder (188) Napoleon intoxicated 
himself with the incense lavished upon 
him and commenced to take his divinity 
into serious consideration ; he was very 
near passing himself off for God, not after 
his death, but while yet alive." 

(189) "A Saint Napoleon was imagined, 
whose festival was confounded with that of 
the Virgin Mary on the 15th August," and 
"next to the Persons of the Sacred Trin- 
ity (161) the name of the Emperor was in- 
troduced," evidences to what a pitch he 
had reached in his desire to interpret reli- 
gious texts." 

" this man 

Is now become a god — 

— whose bend doth awe the world." 

He was also ever with a folly, which jus- 
tifies Michelet in asserting that "there 
were moments when Napoleon was insane," 
uttering boasts and publishing predictions 
which events stultified. Thus, when he 
went to Spain in 1808, he declared that he 
would drive the Leopards, as he styled the 
Lion Emblems of England, into the sea, 
and he left the work undone and quitted 
the Peninsula with a speed as extraordinar- 
ily rapid as unaccountable, unless he 
dreaded the effects of Spanish vengeance, 
such as that from which, at a later date, 
his brother Joseph had a narrow escape. 

Previous to his contemplated Invasion of 
England, he had a medal struck, in assured 
anticipation of occupying London, bearing 
triumphant effigies and a legend purporting 
that it had been minted in the British cap- 
ital. When his plan failed he had the die 



destroyed, but exemplars have been pre- 
served and it appeared among the medals 
of his reign, of that date. In the same 
way, in his carriage captured at Waterloo, 
feeling assured of victory, there were cap- 
tured large packages of a proclamation, 
dated at the Royal Palace of Lacken, 
falsely dated and located, as if the French 
were in possession of the capital, Brussels. 
Before entering Russia, in 1812, he issued 
a manifesto, predicting the certain conquest 
of that country and humiliation of the Czar. 
The world knows how the verdict was ter- 
ribly reversed. On quitting Moscow, 1812, 
with equal presumption he declared woe 
to the Russians if they attempted to cross 
his path. They did cross it and his army 
perished, and had it not been for the enor- 
mous reinforcements brought up to his res- 
cue on the Berezina, he and his remnants 
would have been captured. As it was, 50,- 
000 lives were sacrificed to get him and his 
suite in safety over that river, and almost 
as many more perished miserably, with the 
only result of enabling him to effect his 
his own flight in safety back to the Rhine. 

In 1814, after ephemeral successes, he de- 
clared he was nearer to Munich than the 
Allies were to Paris ; and, again, "if I gain 
a battle, as I am sure to do" — when every 
battle was occasioning greater actual losses, 
and enormously and greater irreparable 
losses than those sustained by the Allies — 
" I shall be master and exact better condi- 
tions. * * * Xhe tomb of the Russians 
is marked out under the walls of Paris ! 
My measures are all taken and victory can- 
not fail me." 

Within two months he was on his way to 
Elba. 

One question ! It is supposable that At- 
tila, with what is known of him, would 
have offered up his capital. in which he had 
been collecting the spoils and the trophies 
of his whole career, as an incentive to his 
troops to assail that capital solely for his 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



own personal advantage. Would not the 
bold Hun have manoeuvred to obtain a bat- 
tle-field whence, if victorious, he could 
have turned to reoccupy the capital with 
all its riches preserved, or else himself have 
perished in the attempt, as he was willing 
and ready to do if he could not have re- 
treated from Chalons to recuperate his 
strength and renew the "Trial of Battle." 
In spite of his tremendous losses in Gaul, 
now France — -A. D. 451, corresponding in 
a measure to Buonaparte's reverses of 1812, 
the next year, A. D. 452, Attila was suffi- 
ciently formidable to invade Italy and 
threaten Rome. This corresponds to Na- 
poleon's reappearance in Germany in 1813. 



A. D. 453, Attila died. In 1814 Napoleon 
abdicated. On the Netad, A. D. 454, on 
the Second Hunnenschlacht, occurred the 
Waterloo of the Hunnish power. Buona- 
parte's first was Leipsic ; his second, La 
Belle Alliance, miscalled Waterloo. 

There Ellac, the eldest son of Attila — 
battle and results representing Buonaparte's 
utter overthrow in 1815 — lost his life and 
crown and 30,000 Huns their lives, just 
about the number of French who actually 
perished in the Belgian campaign of four 
days. Similar parallelisms might be added, 
but sufficient have been adduced, at this 
time, to manifest the truth of the simile be- 
tween the Corsican and the Hun. 



II. 



Don Juan, xi, 85. 

" I've seen the people ridden o'er like sand 
By slaves on horseback." — Byron. 

"Thus far, go forth, thou lay, which I will back 
Against the same given quantity of rhyme, 
For being as much the subject of attack 
As ever yet was any work sublime. 
By those ivho love to say that white is bi^ack. 
So much the better ! I may stand alone, 
But ivoiM not cliange my free tliouglits for a t/irone." 

— Byron. 
Mens regnum bona possidit. Seneca. 

My mind to me an empire is 
While grace affordeth health. — Southwell. 

Bourrienne (Scribner's iii, 311), who 
knew him so well, presents the follow- 
ing striking exposition or analysis of Buona- 
parte's negative and positive qualities. 

(This is quoted from the edition of Col. 
R. W. Phipps, late Royal Artillery, pub- 
lished by Charles Scribner's Sons, New 
York, 1889, but the reader is kindly re- 
quested to compare this translation with 
that of John S. Memes's, Edinburgh, 1831, 
given herewith as a note.*) 

*The character of Bonaparte presents the most inex- 
plicable contrasts ; though the most obstinate of mor- 
tals, no man ever more easily allowed himself to be led 
away by the charm of illusions ; m many respects, to 
desire and to believe were with him one and the same 



"Bonaparte's character presents many 
unaccountable incongruities. Although 
the most positive man that perhaps ever 
existed, yet there never was one who more 
readily yielded to the charm of illusion. In 
many circumstances the wish and the 

act. And never had he been more under the empire 
of illusion than during the early part of the campaign 
of Moscow. The easy progress of his troops, the burn- 
ing of towns and villages on their approach, ought to 
have prepared him for a Parthian warfare, where re- 
treat, drawing him into the heart of the country, was 
only preparatory to rendering the advance more fear- 
ful. All wise men, too, before those disasters which 
marked the most terrible of retreats recorded in his- 
tory, were unanimous as to the propriety of spending 
the winter of 1812-13 in Poland — there to establish, 
though only provisionally, a grand nursery for the 
mighty enterprise of the following spring. But the 
illusions of an impatient ambition urged him on, and 
his ear was deaf to ever}' other sound save ' ' Forward ! ' ' 
Another illusion, justified perhaps by the past, was the 
belief that Alexander, the moment that he should be- 
hold the van of the French columns on the Russian 
territory, would propose conditions of peace. At 
length the burning of Moscow revealed to Napoleon 
that it was a war to the death ; and he that had been 
hitherto accustomed to receive propositions from van- 
quished enemies, now for the first time found his own 
rejected. — "Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, from 
the French of M. Fauvelet de Bourrietme, by John S. 
Memes, LL. D., Vol. IV, pp. 94-5, Edinburgh, 1831. 



Napolkone di Buonaparte. 



REALITY were to him one and THE SAME 
THING. He never indulged in greater il- 
lusions ihaji at the beginning of the cam- 
paign of Moscow. Even before the ap- 
proach of the disasters whith accompanied 
the most fatal retreat recorded in history, 
all sensible persons concurred in the opin- 
ion that the Emperor ought to have passed 
the winter of 1812-13 in Poland, and have 
resumed his vast enterprises in the spring. 
But his natural impatience impelled him 
forward, as it were, unconsciously, and he 
seemed to be under the influence of an in- 
visible [evil] demon [like the good daemon 
of Socrates] stronger than even his own 
strong will. This demon was ambition. 
He who knew so ivell the VALUE (t/TIME 
never sufficiently understood its POWER, 
and hoiu much is sometimes gained by delay ? 
Yet Csesar's Commentaries, which were 
his favorite study, ought to have shown 
him that Csesar did not conquer Gaul in 
one campaign." 

Dr. Dendy, in his " Philosophy of Mys- 
tery," Harper's Edition, 1847, 305~6, re- 
marks, ' ' There is a somewhat remote 
analogy to this [the effects of somnambu- 
lism] in the want of balance in the judg- 
ment and volition of ambitious minds. In 
the campaign of Russia, Napoleon's march 
was a sort of somnambulism, for he must 
have been madly excited to have taken 
action against his better judgment." In 
other words the question presents itself 
whether he was not partially insane. Mich- 
elet avers that, at times, he was so. After 
his divorce from Josephine and his marriage 
with Marie lyouise, he completely changed 
his habits of life, and, from comparative 
abstention, became luxurious and sensuous 
as well as sensual. For nearly two years 
he did not take the field, and he undertook 
the Russian campaign as monarchs with 
less power would get up a grand hunt. 
Deny it who may his health had deterio- 
rated. In 1805 he had fixed the date 1812 



when the bow would lose its elasticity. 
Besides being actually ill at times, as at 
Borodino, on the march to Moscow, he 
suffered terribly from the heat. His body-- 
servant Constant attests this. On the re- 
treat or flight the exceeding cold in turn 
may have affected his brain. That exces- 
sive protracted cold does affect the mind is 
a well-known medical fact and has been 
the subject of investigation and scientific 
treatises aroused by the conditions observed 
during this very expedition. Again, emi- 
nent writers, especially Michelet, have 
come to the conclusion that unlimited and 
irresponsible power in a very short time 
produces or develops into insanity, of 
which the most marked peculiarity is a 
total disregard of human life and suffering, 
as in the case of the Roman Csesars and of 
the Popes prior to the Reformation. More- 
over, what makes this judgment the more 
applicable to Napoleon is the fact that even 
as Buonaparte had attracted so many flatter- 
ers, venal-advocates of whom a very few ad- 
hered to him at the last and shared his cap- 
tivity, — Nero, the worst of the Csesars, was 
found capable of inspiring attachment, and 
his reappearance wasjoyously expected; and, 
marvelous to state, he has suscitated advo- 
cates and excusers. The same is the case 
with Alexander Borgia, the worst of the 
Popes. He has kindled biographers who 
have striven to show that he has been ma- 
ligned and that he was even a wise and 
just ruler. Judas Iscariot has likewise re- 
cently roused an advocate, a legal light, who 
attempted to argue that his betrayal of his 
Master was not attributable to criminal but 
to comparatively innocent and mitigating 
motives. Finally, it is conceded that 
Buonaparte was subject to epilepsy, and 
that disease indubitably either tempora- 
neously or permanently affects the reason. 
The mortal who could declare, as Buona- 
parte did, that he was above all law and 
that no law was applicable to one in his 



10 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



position, could not have been in the posses- 
sion of even an ordinarily well-balanced 
mind. A judgment affected to such a de- 
gree amounted to an aberration of intellect. 
Consequently it is no more than just to 
fall back upon an idea which is as old as 
philosophy rendered by Dryden : 

Great evils are sure to madness near allied, 
And thin partitions do their bounds divide. 

- And by Pope : 

What thin partitions sense from thought divide. 

Does it not seem absolutely ridiculous to 
argue that Buonaparte had the slightest 
abhorrence of bloodshed or torture in one 
shape or another or in degree when he shot 
and permitted the infliction of torture ; 
when his troops could resort to the most 
atrocious modes of punishment, even em- 
palement, as in Calabria ; when he consid- 
ered an uprising of the oppressed as a 
favorable opportunity to teach a lesson 
against resistance to oppression by liberal 
blood-letting ; and could issue such orders 
as that of 5th of March, 1813, as Charras 
records in his "War of 1813 " (413), to 
the Viceroy Eugene Beauharnais to employ 
"if necessary terror and devastation " upon 
the slightest insult of a city or a " Prussian 
village." Buonaparte wrote to Eugene 
with a veritable demoniac ferocity : " Burn 
it, even if it should be Berlin." Baron 
Odeleben, i, 292, records a ferocity even 
more atrocious than this when, in 1813, 
Napoleon was compelled to evacuate Sax- 
ony, the country of an ally who had stuck 
to him to the last. ' ' He ordered his sub- 
ordinates to carry off with them all the 
cattle, to burn the woods, to destroy the 
fruit trees and everything else which could 
afford nourishment, so that the portion of 
Saxony on the right or east side of the Elbe 
should become a frightful desert. ' ' To sum 
up, to such an extent was meanly insane 
destruction carried on in Russia that the 
troops in advance destroyed the buildings 
which had escaped destruction and which 



might have served as shelters for the troops 
covering the retreat. Was there ever a 
more contemptible exhibition of pure 
malice than blowing up the bastions of 
Vienna when evacuating that city in 1809, 
and blowing up the palace of the Czars, 
the Kremlin, when compelled to abandon 
Moscow in 1812? Such spite very much 
resembles the action of a child which beats 
its own head against the floor when it can- 
not injure the object of its anger. 

lyaying hands or obtaining or examining 
every accessible work on the Corsican or 
Italian, Napoleonedi Buonaparte, closer 
and closer examination seems simply to 
prove that he was one of the most over- 
estimated of men, who have become so 
prominent in history, and one of God's 
scourges to chastise mortals. He was a 
compound of elements, in which the vile 
and criminal so greatly predominated that 
virtues which might have maintained their 
equipoise and influence if existing in no 
greater degree in ordinary men than in him, 
became transmuted into vices through the 
predominance of the evil and energy in 
his case. 

' ' No one, ' ' says Dr. Johnson, ' ' ever rose 
from an ordinary situation in life to high 
destinies without great and commanding 
qualities in his mind being blended with 
meannesses which would be inconceivable 
in private life." Napoleon was a remark- 
able example of this singular but just ob- 
servation. He made it an invariable rule 
never to admit he had judged wrong in 
anything, and, with whatever injustice, to 
lay the blame of every disaster which oc- 
curred on others, rather than bear the 
blame of any part of it himself* 

What is more, he had no hesitation in 
declaring that he was above the application 



*L,ord Castlereagh and Sir Ctarles Stewart, from the 
original papers of the family by Sir Archibald Alison, 
Bart, D. C. L., LL. D., etc.. Vol. II, pp. 45-6, Edin- 
burgh and London, 1861. 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



or opei'ation of all law ; that the laws of 
morals were not applicable to him ; that 
his will was the sole law by which he ruled, 
by which he was to be governed, and the 
catechism which was taught— by his impe- 
rial and despotic command — throughout the 
Empire, is the best proof that he considered 
himself so far above humanity as actually 
to claim to be divine, if the term denti-god, 
as Ireland states, was actually applied by 
him to himself. At all events he accepted 
and even demanded an adulation which was 
utterly blasjahemous, and if he dispensed 
rewards and riches with a lavish hand it 
was simply because he had such a contempt 
for his fellow-beings that, destitute of virtue, 
as Thiers admits, he believed that his 
human beings, his fellows, were so desti- 
tute of virtue themselves that every one of 
both sexes, person and performance, devo- 
tion, body and soul, could only be pur- 
chased, and kept up to their duty by farther 
payments.* 

Two sayings are attributed to Bismarck, 
which have become proverbial : One, 
" Blood and Iron," as the sine qua non of 
Victory; and the other, that "great 
changes in human affairs and steps in pro- 



*Chapters i and ii of Eyre Evans Crowe's "History 
of the Reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X," London, 
1854, present the clearest explanation of the circum- 
stances which constitute the steps by which Buonaparte 
obtained his despotic elevation and maintained himself 
there ; also the basis of his success and the causes of 
his fall. There are ample corroborations of the worst 
which has been alleged against Napoleon in contempo- 
rary' records, which either have never been published, 
or, if in print, have been long since swallowed up in 
vast libraries and forgotten. In the "Car?iets of Gen. 
ICi<EBER," which are preserved in MSS. among the 
archives of the French Minister of War, that general 
noted that " Napoleon was not loved, because he loved 
nobody, believing that he could supply the want of 
love by advancement and by gifts. To sum up, he 
bribed until he had power, and then he used force 
to maintain himself therein. He himself was wont to 
boast that if any of his absolutely necessary instru- 
ments were seeking to escape or breaking through the 
toils, he always knew how to recapture him by bribes 
and lavish rewards. 



gress are, like childbirth, accompanied by 
torture and hemorrhage, sufferings inex- 
pressible and profuse shedding of blood." 
These expressions are eminently true, but 
they were not original with Bismarck. 
The ideas are to be found in German works, 
if not in the very same words, at the time 
when the Tugend Bund {Bond., Leagtie or 
Knot of Virtue) was preparing the public 
mind, especially the youth of Prussia, for 
the great struggle of 1813, which liberated 
Germany and chased Buonaparte and his 
French back across the Rhine, and event- 
ually carried the Allies into Paris and de- 
throned Napoleon in 1814 ; and, again, in 
1815, brought the Prussians, under Bluch- 
ER, and the Anglo- Allies, under Welling- 
ton, on the wings of victory into Paris, 
shattered the hopes and rule of Buonaparte 
and consigned him to his island prison and 
to the grave. 

When Christ came, welcomed by the 
angelic anthem, " Peace on earth and to 
men of good-will," or, " to men in whom He 
is well pleased," which last is alleged to be 
the correct version of St. Luke's words, the 
Roman Emperor exercised dominion over 
all that might be considered the more or 
less civilized earth, SUBJECT TO LAW. 
What was the condition of all beyond, of 
that is very little known or understood. 
Clouds and tokens were thickening towards 
the north, where the Goths or Germans 
{Theotiscans)., imperfectly described by 
Tacitus, were beginning to imagine and 
perhaps plan those successive inroads or 
invasions which ended in blotting out the 
Western Empire ; while the Parthians, 
succeeded by the Saracens and these by the 
Tartars, and those again by the Turks, 
followed each other in surges of "blood 
and iron and fire," until the Crescent sup- 
planted the cross over the whole Eastern 
Empire, which had more gallantly resisted 
their progress than the original Imperial 
City had been able to do. 



12 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



Westandeast, andsouth in Africa, a higher 
or lower civilization was actually over- 
whelmed by tide waves of ' ' blood and iron." 
Countries like the northern coast of Africa, 
which were the granaries of Rome, became 
deserts overspread with mighty ruins. 
Then came the DARK AGES. But dark 
as they were after Attila's grave was lost to 
human ken and Alaric's place of sepulture 
irrecoverably concealed beneath the waters 
of the Bucentinus, there was no conqueror 
arose in Europe to occasion such tremen- 
dous losses of life and such sacrifices to the 
pride and ambition of an upstart, until 
Corsica vomited forth Buonaparte, his fam- 
ily and his satellites, to plunge all Europe 
in promiscuous tortures, devastations, sac- 
rifices and slaughter. Between Attila and 
Buonaparte there had been wars and con- 
tinual wars, but none, not even the re- 
motest expeditions of Charlemagne, em- 
braced areas so wide apart as woe and waste 
were carried or sent by Buonaparte. Yes, 
into regions utterly unknown to Karl der 
Grosse — whom Buonaparte ridiculously 
aped — and to his successors and to Europe 
for over nine hundred years. To the north, 
Buonaparte carried fire and sword to the 
sea. That he could not cross — it was the 
dominion of Great Britain, against which 
his impotent efforts were shattered. To 
the east, to Moscow, at once the ancient 
and holy capital of Russia, with a climate 
which, in the wrath of God, as expressed 
in the Psalms, froze that giant force with 
which he calculated to complete the con- 
quest of Europe, and thence carry fire and 
sword and oppression into Turkey, Persia 
and India. To the southeast, his deluded 
battalions subjected Egypt and attempted 
the subjugation of Syria, which was to 
serve as the threshold for steps with which 
to cross and whereon to rise to that Oriental 
tiara and scepter wherewith the apostate 
Romanist was to revolutionize Europe from 
the east. Arrested again by Great Britian, 



the saviour of Europe, through Aboukir 
and at Acre, he abandoned his deluded 
troops and fled into the willing arms of 
that nation of which Arndt declared "wind 
[vanity] is the element of the French, 
water and foam his nature." Not content 
with crushing free thought and independ- 
ence in Europe and Asia, he could not 
leave the poor Africans in the West Indies 
to develop under a native leader, Toussiant 
I'Ouverture, fully as able as himself in his 
comparative sphere : and there, in his vain 
endeavor to reverse the liberty accorded by 
French Liberals, fighting against tropical 
heat, climate and climatic diseases- — as in 
Russia ten years afterward against cold 
and space* — that is against the Almighty, 
assisted by His human instruments. Great 
Britain's fleets — he sacrificed to the west 
the finest, most honest, most republican 
army which France ever possessed, an 
army which, under Hoche, Moreau, and 
subordinates like St. Cyr, had achieved 
such triumphs for the true glory of France. 
Buonaparte, like a cyclone, an earth- 
quake, an eruption, like that of Krackatoa, 
felt around the earth ball, "the Black Death" 
or the cholera, or any other cataclysm, was 
an instrument to work out God's purposes in 
a way incomprehensible to mortals. Why 
good should be evolved through evilisTHE 
great question, but, it is certain, victory does 
not depend on an ideal Napoleon, nor a per- 
fect array, but on the lyord of Hosts and God 
of Battles. The connection between the 



*Space.— Montalembert (according to Senior ii, 165- 
6) has extracted from I^acordaire's Cotiferences de 
Notre Dame a wonderful passage on the power of 
Space. The following is a translation, but it cannot 
convey the concrete eloquence of the original : 

' ' For years the last of the ' ' Great Captains ' ' had sub- 
jected Fortune to his Will. The Alps aud the Pyre- 
nees had trembled beneath his tread. Europe in silence 
listened to the reverberation of his thought. When 
tired of this domain, wherever glory had exhausted all 
its resources to satisfy him, he precipitated himself 
even to the boundaries of Asia. Then his glance be- 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



13 



visible and invisible is beyond human com- 
prehension, but it exists and influences 
everything. When progress halts, the Su- 
preme or the Day of Vengeance arrives. 
As Isaiah declared, "the Lord shall hiss 
for the fly * * * of Egypt, and for the 
bee * * * of Assyria, and shave with 
a razor that is hiied, namely, * * * by 
the King of Assyria. " 

Even as Nimrod was a mighty hunter 
before the Lord, of men and beasts — not in 
the dawn of the world, as hitherto sup- 
posed, but in the dimmer misty twilight of 
history — so Bwnaparte — "the torturer of 
nations," pre-ordained by Heaven to fill 
that part — ravaged, ruined, slaughtered and 
strewed the earth with seeds of evil from 
which the All Wise caused to grow and 
produced harvests of progress and ultimate 
good. Incomprehensible the WHY. Hu- 
manity can only perceive results. 

It was almost impossible for an individ- 
ual who has not had access to books which 
do not constitute popular reading to imagine 
the condition of France at the outbreak of 
the French Revolution. Not only the no- 



came troubled and his eagles turned their hea(^s for the 
first time. What had he then encountered ? Was it a 
general more able than himself? No ! An army 
■which had not yet been conquered ? No ! Or was it 
that age had already chilled his genius ? No ! What 
then had he met ? He had encountered the Protector 
of the Weak, the Asj'lum of oppressed peoples, the 
Great Defender of human liberties ; He had encoun- 
tered SPACE, and all his power failed beneath his feet. 
For if God has created such barriers in the bosom of 
nature it is because He has pity upon us. He knew all 
that which violent unity concentrates of despotism and 
of misfortune for the human race and He has prepared 
for us unattainable retreats in the mountains and the 
deserts. O, inaccessible mountains, eternal snows, 
burning sands, pestiferous marshes, destructive cli- 
mates, to you we return thanks for the past and in you 
we hope in the future. Yes, you will preserve for us 
free oases, hidden paths ; you will not permit chemis- 
trj' to prevail against nature ; and to make of the globe, 
so wisely moulded by the Hand of God, a horrible area 
and a close dungeon [one from which there is no es- 
cape] , where fire and sword will be the chief officers of 
a pitiless autocracy. ' ' 



bility, but the priesthood were steeped in 
immorality, and the treatment of the 
peasantry and poor was worse than would 
now be permitted to domestic animals. 
When the French officers apd troops re- 
turned from America, in 1782, they set 
their nation aflame. Why the Almighty 
permitted the explosion which ensued and 
the rise of the scum to the surface and to 
rule, is incomprehensible to a reflecting 
mind. The seething of the cauldron in- 
deed brought the scum to the surface, and 
out of that scum was evolved Buonaparte. 
That violent diseases require violent reme- 
dies, and horrible accidents, heroic treat- 
ment, is also true. Perhaps as the Supreme 
Ruler works by Law, it was necessary for 
such a wretch as Buonaparte, with his abili- 
ties and his abominations, to grasp the 
wand which alone could bring order out of 
chaos. With all his ability he was the 
greatest actor who ever trod a public stage. 
Mendacious and mean, deceitful and des- 
perate, a charlatan and a quack, with some 
knowledge X)f the necessary remedies, he 
just suited the times when crime and 
not morality, blood-letting and force not 
justice and equity and mercy, were the only 
measures capable of disciplining a people 
gone mad. There were generous elements 
at work ; there were honest men, like Hoche 
and Moreau, striving to knead the dough. 
Alas, they were too much governed with 
rectitude, they were too weak in their gen- 
erosity to handle the mass. The instru- 
ments which were needed were not men 
like Washington, but immoralities, like 
Rousseau, specious miscreants ; one now 
blatherskiting through the country might 
be cited as a co-disciple. 

Buonaparte has been aptly styled the 
"Torturer of Nations." Eccelino da Ro- 
mano, no greater tyrant for his times, was 
a gentleman to him, for if he was cruel and 
despotic he died like a hero, tearing the 
bandages off" of his wounds received in 



u 



Napoleon E m Buonaparte. 



battle, and refusing to live out his days 
and die in captivity. 

Buonaparte was not always successful as 
represented. His vaunted campaign of 
1796 was nothing as fine as that of Prince 
Eugene in 1706. He was not always uni- 
formly victorious, like Marlborough or like 
Wellington. He was not indomptable, 
like Blucher. He extricated himself, as in 
1797, by cunning and lies through the 
miserable weakness of Austria, bribing that 
untrustworthy government, always, as 
Shakspere describes it, " thou ever stronger 
on the strongest side." He failed in Syria 
and he fled from Egypt. He was beaten 
at Marengo and saved there by Desaix, 
Marmont and Kellerman, and on the Dan- 
ube by Moreau. His threatened invasion of 
England was a fiasco. The success of his 
famous campaign of Austerlitz was due to 
a miserable creature. Mack, whose very 
name signifies "disaster," and again by the 
weak back of Austria, when in reality Buon- 
aparte was in a terrible predicament. The 
victorious campaign of Jena again, was 
due to the unutterable weakness and in- 
efficiency of the Prussian leaders. Fear of 
assassination cut short his campaign in 
Spain, a country to which he never dared 
to return. The result of his campaign of 
Wagram was again attributable to Austria's 
weak knees. He left the field of Aspern in 
a skiff", as he left Russia in a sleigh. He 
abandoned his army in Russia, as he aban- 
doned his army after Leipsic, as he abdi- 
cated in 1814. Rogniat and Jomini charge 
him with want of TRUE courage at Leipsic. 
He was certainly wanting to the situation 
after Waterloo. To deny him the ordinary 
courage of a professional soldier is a false- 
hood ; to credit him with the courage of a 
Blucher or a thousand other generals is 
equally a falsehood. As Arndt (64) declares, 
"with him everybody, everything was to 
be sacrificed for him, the Great Emperor, 
and he, the Emperor, was to make no sac- 
rifice for anything or anybody." 



Undiscoverable are the ways of the Lord, 
and no mortal may judge or attempt to un- 
derstand them. That such a creature as 
Buonaparte should have had such a career of 
success proves that he was the only such 
an one fitted for a scourge of the times. It 
is horrible to contemplate the necessity of 
a Buonaparte or a condition of things re- 
quiring the reappearance of a Hun, like 
Attila. 

It was not only in his expenditure of 
French life and the infernal outrages against 
humanity throughout Europe and else- 
where, by which his opportunities were ob- 
tained, but by the other devilish meas- 
ures by which — even by forcibly marrying 
heiresses to subordinates, military and civil 
— that Buonaparte demoralized France. As 
an instance of this, it is mentioned in the 
Life of Lord Stratford de Redcliff"e (born Can- 
ning), by his biographer, that when Buona- 
parte returned from Elba, in 1815, "at Lyon, 
amid massacre and popular violence," " the 
Black Flag [was] hoisted and the most im- 
pious mottoes stuck about the town," — for 
instance, "Hurrah for Hell, the Republic, 
and Death !" [? Meaning the return of the 
Robespierrian " Reign of Terror. " There 
was something like it, termed the "White 
Terror," in the south of France in 1814.] 

The terrible condition of Europe brought 
about by the satanic cunning and Attila 
application of numbers, of that Man of Sin, 
through his artful separation of allies by 
defamation and false pretences, fraud and 
force, by ' ' the great art of the modern 
Machiavelli," could alone hope for a happy 
change through the direct interposition of 
the Lord of Hosts, which came in 1812, by 
His frost and ice and snow. 

Previous to that, as spoken by Lord 
Grenville, "This [the condition of Europe 
under Buonaparte, 1800-1812] is the true 
omnipotence of Hell, which Dante 
in the spirit of prophecy paints so sub- 
limely." (Napoleon and the French peo- 
ple, 165). Examine Dante. 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



15 



Buonaparte's rule in Germany was styled 
"Hell," in 1813, and here in France a like 
return was frantically invoked. 

Strange to say, Buonaparte was so aware 
of his unpopularity in Paris that when he 
fled home from Russia he entered his capi- 
tal in the night, so again in 1813 — he did 
not enter it in 1814, — and so in 1815. 
Michelet, in his "Jnsqu' a Waterloo,-" 239, 
says, "Buonaparte had more fear of Paris 
than of the whole world besides." It is a 
curious coincidence that in the last year, 
arriving from Elba, he entered his capital 
by the Porte d'' Enfer (Gate of Hell), and 
from what subsequently occurred it was 
significant. What is more curious, when 
the corpse of Talleyrand — Buonaparte's 
arch-manipulator and ultimate Achitophel 
— left Paris on the way to its last resting- 
place, the postillion as usual asked by what 
route he was to drive, and the answer was 
"Porte d' Enfer." 

If 'Mr. J. K. Bangs is right that Napoleon 
now reigns in Hell and the expelled Devil 
in Paris, what more appropriate than that 
city should maintain for one of its en- 
trances the appellation "Gate of Hell," 
for if ever there was a city fit for the capi- 
tal of Satan it has been and is Paris, and 
within a few years there was a statement 
published with an account of a Meeting of 
of Disciples, showing that its population 
comprised among others a Society for the 
Worship of the Devil. 

The world has been filled, now, for nearly 
a century, with the renown accorded to 
Buonaparte for his Code Napoleon, with 
which he had but little to do except to 
make it subserve his own illegal purposes. 
Among other examples of this was its appli- 
cation to divorce, as if he was looking 
forward to his own and other cases in his 
family. But even, as Shakspere declared, 
that Providence often converts our pleas- 
ant vices into scourges, Buonaparte in 
affixing his signature to his act of separa- 
tion from Josephine, signed the decree of 



his own fall. There is no question but 
that Buonaparte owed his first real rise to 
receiving the hand of Josephine and with 
it the command of the Army of Italy, and 
she plaintively but prophetically reminded 
him when about to repudiate her, '■'' Remem- 
ber, Napoleon, the crown zv as foretold to MU 
and NQT to you /' ' and that crown, she was 
the means of his attaining, was undoubtedly 
lost by his bigamy with Marie Louise, who 
was no more his legitimate wife in spite of 
the concurrence of servile prelates and 
slavish officials than criminal espousals, 
which have sent hundreds upon hundreds 
into state prisons. Moreover, when Malet 
came near getting possession of Paris in 
1812 and overthrowing the imperial rule 
there, and declared Buonaparte's son a 
foundling, born in unlawful wedlock, cer- 
tainly his ideas were in accord with those 
of Pope Pius VII. In the eyes of the law 
the son which Maria Louisa bore to Buona- 
parte was as illegitimate as the son she bore 
to General Count Neipperg before Buona- 
parte was dead in St. Helena. 

Buonapartists claim that all the ameliora- 
tions and improvements in the condition of 
the different nations of Europe are attribu- 
table to Napoleon.* They were due to the 



*N0TE. TURCOT the Statesman.— "To-Aay the world 
reads and talks about Napoleon and pays homage to 
his genius as a military leader and statesman, even 
while condemning his cruel sacrifice of human life upon 
the altar of personal ambition. But the day will come 
when it will be recognized by the world at large, as it 
is to-day by the unprejudiced student of liistory, tliat 
a greater tfian Napoleon held the fortunes of France 
in his hands for a brief period in the last half of the 
XVIII Century, and that, with far less opportunity 
and freedom of action, TuRGOT in reality planned and 
carried out as great reforms as did Napoleon, and dem- 
onstrated that he possessed even greater gejiius ttian 
Napoleon for political administration. True, Tur- 
got's reforms were swept away when he was driven 
from office, and France fell back into the slough from 
which he was successfully extricating her. But that 
does uot alter the facts as they were at that time, when 
Turgot's remarkable public career was cut short by the 
refusal of Louis XVI longer to support him." 



16 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



progress of the age, to the Revolution in 
America, to the seed obtained there and 
carried back to France by the French con- 
tingent permitted to be sent out by Louis 
XVI, for which he paid with his head. 
The seed planted in France, fructified with 
bloody fertilizers during the French Revol- 
ution, was carried forth with deceitful hands 
and sown broadcast by Revolutionary armies 
for their own wicked ends, not for the pros- 



perity of those among whom it was sown. 
Stein, who brought to the. birth the reno- 
vation of Prussia and his coadjutors in the 
great work, owed nothing whatever to the 
conceptions or suggestions of Buonaparte ; 
so much so that Stein and those cooperating 
with him were driven out of Germany by 
the orders of Buonaparte, and, in exile, 
propagated the ideas which in 1813 bore 
ample fruit for their persecutor's destruction. 



III. 



"A 1,IE should be trampled ou and extinguished 
wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere 
•when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes 
around me." — Carlyle. 

" ^The old ma7i is right,' said Dame Hsedwig [Duch- 
ess of Suabia] , when Ekkehard reported to her the re- 
sult of his mission. 'When the enemy threatens — 
prepare, and when he attacks us — beat him ; that is so 
simple that one hardly need ask any one's advice. / 
verily believe that the habit of too much reflection and 
hesitation has been sown in Germany by the hands of 
the enemy. He who hesitates is lost, and he who 
misses the right moment for action often, digs his own 
grave. WE WILI, GET READY.'" Chapter xii, page 
219, Vol. I, " Ekkehard ; A Tale of the Tenth Cen- 
tury." By Joseph Victor von Scheffel. Translated 
from, the German. New York, 1890. 

I have written a great many things in 
my day which 1 regret. They were founded 
on Faith in older men. Historical criti- 
cism in its true meaning did not arise as a 
rule, only sporadically, until within 30, 
certainly not more than 50, years. Gradu- 
ally I grew, and grew into seeing for my- 
self, and gradually I became an Agnostic, 
not in the objectionable signification of an 
often too unreflectingly and falsely applied 
term, but in the sense of Montaigne, ''''Que 
saisje.'''' Then I examined everything for 
myself, and now, what I write is founded on 
what are considered bed-rock authorities, 
personal observation of human nature, re- 
flection, comparison and individual judg- 
ment. 

Napoleon, Joseph Charles Paul — known 



under the name of Prince Napoleon and 
also the soubriquet of Plon Plon — wrote in 
1888 a book entitled "Napoleon and His 
Detractors," which was translated and 
edited by Raphael Ledos de Beaufort, Lon- 
don, 1888. The labors of the author of 
the Biographical Sketch are simply an imi- 
tation of the panegyrists of " Napolione di 
Buonaparte," such as those that his hero 
recites, as the best expositors of the charac- 
ter of his uncle (152), Thiers, Norvins, Laur- 
ent de I'Ardeche, Armand Carrel, Beran- 
ger, Pierre Leroux, likewise the republican 
Vaulabelle, the author of a history which 
is a real monument for the years of 1814 
and 1 81 5. 

In one respect Professor Sloane is most 



In his "Lifeof Napoleon Bonaparte," London, 1828, 
W. H. Ireland, Esq , Vol. IV, p. 269, would seem to 
be jocose, when, amid the many falsifications he de- 
liberately publishes to paint his hero in saintly colors, 
he ventures upon the following mendacious statement, 
which caps the climax of his self-stultifications : "/^ is 
justice due to Napoleo7t to state that no man ever pos- 
sessed purer morals or took so much pains to check 
scandal." Prof. William M. Sloane, who, with the 
apparently earnest desire to be impartial, seems to 
carry water on both shoulders as well as on his head, 
sometimes exhibits a regular example of Japanese 
balanciug-jvigglery. Nevertheless, he comes out very 
handsomely in his January article of his series in the 
Century. Previously it seems, honestly to make his 
ascriptions like the marked superscriptions of a palimp- 
sest, but in January he speaks his mind more consist- 
ently with his reputation as an historian of the Tacitus 
school and does not seek to whitewash a sepulchre full 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



17 



commendable. He presents us with a lovely 
picture of the winning Queen Louise of 
Prussia, and if ever Buonaparte showed 
himself in his true colors, as a pre-eminent 
liar and slanderer, it was in his aspersions 
of the character and chastity of one of the 
purest and sweetest of women who ever 
wore a crown, whose only fault was her 
burning patriotism and her faith in the 
qualities of an army inherited from a hero 
and monarch, so far superior to Buonaparte 
as a soldier and sovereign as gold is to 
pinchbeck — one whom von Clausewitz 
places on the apex of the pyramid, because 
his work was complete — outlived him — as 
proved by what the Hohenzollerns have ac- 
complished, and the world recognizes the 
fact to-day, while Buonaparte's crumbled 
while he yet ought to have been in his 
prime. 

These authors, praised by Prince Napo- 
leon, are simply perverters of facts, un- 
blushing flatterers, worthy to rank with the 
Rev. John S. C. Abbott,* whose produc- 
tion is so utterly untrustworthy, that, to any 
honest historical student, it must appear 
absolutely ridiculous. 

It is scarcely surprising that Prince Na- 
poleon gave himself such airs, as his resem- 
blance to his imcle was most startling from 

of all unclean uess. He draws it mi dly, but he draws 
it truly. The fact is many biographers are like poor 
Frankinsteiu, who evoked a monster, and, in their 
terror at the horror they vitalized, sought to mask him 
with the vizor and garments of virtues their subject did 
not possess, and in doing so produced something like a 
Lothario blended with a saint. 

*NoTE. — As far as a youth and young man can be 
intimate with a middle-aged gentleman the writer was 
so with Mr. Harper, the head of Harper Brothers, who 
was afterwards mayor of New York. When this J. S. C. 
Abbott was publishing his mythical history of Buona- 
parte, a strange blending of fantastic conceptions and 
distorted facts, often verging on the developments of a 
Munchausen imagination, the writer asked Mr. Harper 
how such a farrago of exaggerations came to be pub- 
lished. He laughed kindly, and when he had recov- 
ered his composure, he said : ' ' Why the Reverend author 



his boyhood to his grave. The writer who 
saw him on board the French steamer Henri 
IV., in 1834, in the harbor of Leghorn, re- 
members his appearance as well as if it was 
yesterday, and can bear witness to the like- 
ness. He was then twelve, and the writer 
thirteen, and, at that early age, seemed to 
pose as he did throughout life. To use 
American half-slang adjectives, he was as 
"tonguey and brassy," as he was "brainy 
and bold" in expressing his opinions. A? 
to his mental ability, there can be no doubt. 
M. de Beaufort makes him out a military 
hero likewise, but with that we have noth- 
ing to do herein. * 

The vials of bitterest wrath are poured 
forth on M. Taine, then others upon Prince 
Metternich, Bourrienne, Madame de Rem- 
usat, the Abbe de Pradt, Miot de Melito. 
By the way, there were two Miots, oue of 
whom was an officer with Buonaparte in 
Egypt, and the other a courtier and diplo- 
mat. Finally, Prince Napoleon appeals to 
his uncle's correspondence. It is not cred- 
ible that those who are seeking to exalt 
Buonaparte dared to publish all that ex- 
isted, if such there is, as that to which ref- 
erence is made in this very article in con- 
nection with Professor Sloane's Century 
article. 



tells me he never begins a chapter without praj'er for 
the guidance of his pen." " Mr. Harper, forgive me for 
asking you, which way does he direct his prayers? Up 
[to the Fountain of Truth] or down [to the Father of 
Lies] ?" Mr. Harper'skindly eyes were radiant through 
his spectacles, but no response came from his lips. It 
is a wonder that such a firm as the Harper Brothers 
could have published such a book was the opinion of 
Bishop Potter of Pennsylvania, who wrote some severe 
reviews of it, but perhaps they had been carried away 
by the Life of Buonaparte in four volumes by Ireland, 
who, in summing up the character of his subject, de- 
clares him. to have been a model of moral purity, 
which is about as far from the truth as the zenith of 
fact from the nadir of falsehood. 



* See curious anecdote in Victor Tissot's " Voyage au 
Pays des Milliards" Paris, i8S4,page 43, Ludwigs- 
bourg. 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



As to Taine, he needs no defence ; his 
works speak for themselves. The authen- 
ticity of the Memoirs of Caulincourt, and 
those of Bonrrienne, have been questioned 
like those of Barras and Talleyrand. It is 
impossible for any one to sift out the wheat 
of truth from the chaff of error, but if 
Bourrienne did slander he has been slan- 
dered in return, and the balance of relia- 
bility has to be adjusted by corroborative 
contemporaneous evidence, which is in his 
favor. It has been set down that Buona- 
parte considered that the two writers who 
had done him the most harm were the Abbe 
de Pradt and the Prussian general, Count 
Truchsess Waldbourg, — the first, by his 
report of the interview at Warsaw, in 1812, 
in which Buonaparte repeatedly uttered the 
phrase "there is but one step from the sub- 
lime to the ridiculous," and the second, by 
his report of the incidents of Buonaparte's 
journey to Elba, in 1814, in which Buona- 
parte became a pitiable object through his 
complete abandonment of any self-control. 
Unfortunately, de Pradt's account is sub- 
stantiated by eye-witnesses of unquestion- 
able veracity, as was that of Truchsess 
Waldbourg equally attested by unimpeach- 
able evidence. 

But if all that we have from those, whose 
reliability Prince Napoleon seeks to demol- 
ish, was swept away, hundreds of books 
remain with which few readers are ac- 
quainted, but whose authors are much more 
severe than those he styles "Detractors." 
A number of these have been referred to, 
such as Charras, Pasquier, Chaptal, Bon- 
do is, M' Queen, &c., &c. 

But what could he bring forward to meet 
a number cited by lyarousse, * and Pierrart in 



*NoTb;. — The idol has been thrown down, the man 
unmasked. Hatred and scorn have succeeded to the 
love and admiration of which he had been so long the 
object. The idolatry which had placed him almost 
upon an altar will forever remain as an example of the 
[deUisive] shock which military glory produced upon 



his " Drame de Waterloo, ' Paris, 1868, or 
works which have appeared since that date. 
Even Marshal Macdonald makes revelations 
which are far from creditable ; Marshal St. 
Cyr is extremely severe, and many others, 
who, with the evident intention of bolster- 
ing up the character of Buonaparte, let out 
most derogatory secrets. 

To one who has just risen from the spe- 
cious work of " Napoleon and His Detrac- 
tors," to such a one it is alone possible to 
appreciate how the world can be trapped by 
the able manipulation of words. It was 
said of Queen Christiana of Sweden, who, 
in reality, alone engineered the Peace of 
Westphalia, in the interests of petty personal 
results, at the sacrifice of great general prin- 
ciples for which her father, Gustavus Adol- 
phus, died, "the bitter attacks which 
have clouded her fame originated chiefly 
in her disregard of conventionalities, with 
which no rank or station can safely dis- 
pense." Even so it is true with an author 

minds and of the long success which a great historic 
imposture can obtain. Through his works, his corres- 
pondence, his memoirs, of the details known of his con- 
duct, through everything which recent labors have gath- 
ered, now a character evolves itself which can be summed 
up in three words : egoism as motor, falsehood and 
charlatanism as means, domination as objective. Buona- 
parte showed himself brutal in prosperity, pitiable in 
adversity. Loquacious, passionate, peremptory, ar- 
rogant, presumptuous, he meddled with everything 
and in everything blundered. A voluminous collection 
should be made of the ridiculous opinions, authentic 
stupidities, which issued from his lips. The certain sign 
of a distempered mind is that he had no conception of 
the nature of things ; not only morality had no exist- 
ence for him, he had no conception of [consideration 
for] the rights of humanity and the power of ideas ; he 
equally despised the one and the other, thinking that, 
through terror, deceit and violence, he could attain his 
object in everything, but even to the end he misconceiv- 
ed the limits of the possible, and he precipitated himself 
blindly into insane plans ; his power of calculation ap- 
plied to details only served to justify him in his folly, 
and his words, his insensate dreams, even after Water- 
loo, attest that in this respect his malady was incurable. 
— Republique Francaise , 15th Januarj', 1873, quoted 
in the "Summary of Buonaparte," in "Le Grand Dic- 
tionnaire Universel die XIX Siecle," of Pierre Larousse. 



Napoleone Dr Buonaparte. 



who runs or writes against the prejudices 
and preconceived opinions of multitudinous 
general readers of superficial writers— mere 
parrots in words, and even ideas, and their 
application — whose wheels run in the same 
ruts of error, deepening them, as they roll 
along, until the force of truth is inadequate 
to extricate them. As an instance in point, 
a prolific military author has just published 
a work on Gustavus Adolphus and the 
Thirty Years' War, in which he shows pro- 
found ignorance, intentionally, or ignores 
the efforts and effects of generals who 
were as much more able than those whom 
he lauds as suns arc to planets — generals, 
whom Colonel, afterwards General, John 
Mitchell in his " Wallenstein," and the 
Prussian military critics in their "Geschichte 
des Kriegwesens," Berlin, 1828, assign to 
so high a rank as commanders that they 
consider that there were '''' even single 
moments of their lives, [in masterly concep- 
tion and execution] which surpassed all the 
successes, however great, achieved by Gus- 
tavus Adolphus." 

This General Mitchell, in his "Fall of 
Napoleon" — little known and seldom 
quoted — furnishes the ablest exhibii. of the 
littlenesses on all lines and in every degree 
of Buonaparte that has ever been published, 
and he knew more upon the subjects he 
treated than those who, like Thiers, have 
filled the eyes and ears of the world with 
their splendid mendacities. 

While scourges, like Attila, Tamerlane, 
Buonaparte and their peers in evil, deluged 
Kingdoms and Empires with blood and left 
nothing behind them but ruins and ashes 
and a "name at which the world grew 
pale," the advance of human progress has 
been decided more than once by a mere 
skirmish, as at Concord, where 
"Once the embattled farmer stood 
And fired the shot heard round the world. ' ' 

Even so the exaggerated fame of Buona- 
parte — who, after all, was simply a repeti- 



tion of Wallenstein as a Condottiere on a 
vaster and viler scale — was built up upon the 
acts of predecessors, and subordinates whom 
he ignored, taking all the glory to him- 
self, which to ignorant observers, were ap- 
parently as insignificant as those battles of 
the American Revolution which were stig- 
matized as having been "fought out by 
squads of men," of which the shots were 
not only heard around all the world, but to 
this day speak out in thunder tones their 
effects on the whole succeeding century and 
the vast future. 

These remarks may all seem to ordinary 
readers as phantasmagoria, but it never 
should be for a moment forgotten that what 
appeared to our fathers as witchcraft and 
folly, to their children has been shown to 
be absolute fact — take, for instance, the 
triumphs of electricity. The Book of 
Books declares " Nothing is hid that shall 
not be manifested," a promise which has 
been formulated by the great French philos- 
opher Montesquieu that "sooner or later 
everything makes itself known (or is found 
out)." Thus it is and will be in regard to 
the truth about Napolione di Buonaparte. 

Since the writer commenced posting him- 
self to prepare the articles which have ap- 
peared in connection with Buonaparte, by 
observing auction catalogues, importations 
and private purchases, quite an extraordi- 
nary library in different languages has been 
collected. Among these books bought at 
auction is " Les femmes gallantes des Na- 
poleons. Secrets de Cour et de Palais, par 
des Lettres et des Conversations Authen- 
tiques," par Eugene Mirecourt, published 
in Berlin, 1862, by Jules Abelsdorff. It evi- 
dently belonged to some person of literary 
consequence, for it has been annotated and 
corrected with evident care, besides bearing 
a complicated monogram and crest em- 
bossed on the title page, and it is well bound 
in morocco by a firm in Glasgow, whose 
name is stamped on the fly-leaf. 



20 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



As a strong evidence that the author, 
whether the name is his own or assumed, 
knew what he was writing about, a friend 
instituted a search through several books 
treating of the genealogy of the Buona- 
partes, and established the connection ex- 
actly as stated by Mirecourt. 

As regards the first Buonaparte and his 
family and surroundings, Mirecourt is the 
only one who has met the question so 
squarel}'; but most of the statements which 
he makes are alluded to more or less dis- 
tinctly in other works. As a single in- 
stance : Barras has been bitterly blamed 
for what he has left on record in regard to 
the first Emperor's first wife. Dr. Leo, the 
historian, who published in Halle, 1856, in 
German, states, in a cold phlegmatic man- 
ner, thatshewas "Barras' maitresse," which 
shows that he considered he was citing an 
historical incident which, when he wrote, 
was accepted as a recognized fact. Nor let 
it be forgotten, as alluded to in a former 
article. Admiral Sir George Cockburn, in 
his Diary of Buonaparte's last voyage, re- 
cords : "I must say from what I have 
hitherto seen and learned, I begin to think 
Mr. Goldsmith had more foundation for 
many of his statements in his ' Secret His- 
tory of St. Cloud ' than he has generally 
received credit for (p. 24)." Again, at p. 73, 
"it is right that at the same time I should 
remark that there was something of mali- 
cious cunning in General Buonaparte's 
manner whilst making this statement which 
induced me very much to doubt the truth 
of the whole story, * * ••' and thereby 
offered General Buonaparte some chance of 
being revenged upon him for the unquali- 
fied abuse he has so lavishly heaped upon 
the General and his family." 

These things are alluded to, not to stir up 
the malodorous facts connected with Buona- 
parte, to which Constant continually refers 
in an apologeticmanner, buttoconfirm what 



Masson says, p. 313 :* " One calls his con- 
duct with women brutal^ because he was 
pressed for time and had none to waste on 
delicacy, and to judge the men of the empire 
and, much more, the Emperor, by the 
hypocritical and scanty morals of the mid- 
dle classes, it becomes necessary first to 
bring this middle class into existence." 

This seen;s to be a very poor excuse, be- 
cause at all times, in France, there has 
been a middle class which was as distinctly 
moral as in any other country. It is true 
the best part of the truly moral was mostly 
expunged through the Revocation of the 
Edict of Nantes and the expulsion or de- 
struction of the Protestant element, but 
many foreign writers have attested that 
there is a strong leaven of the strictest prin- 
ciple still left in the country, in spite of the 
examples, seductions and influence of the 
Buonapartes. 

At all events, Masson, with all his ex- 
tenuations, simply corroborates and sup- 
plements lung, d'Herrisson, Taine, and 
others, just as they corroborate and amplify 
Masson. It is said there is no smoke with- 
out fire, but there may be considerable 
smoke with very little fire during the con- 

*Constaut pretends to be judicious, and sets forth Na- 
poleon's faults as well as his virtues ; but he never quite 
succeeds in being anything but indulgently apologetic 
for peccadilloes which are to be conceded to genius and 
for actions which would have been criminal in a man, 
but were " statesmanship " in a sovereign. To Constant 
he seemed wise, patriotic, deepl}' learned; witty, magnifi- 
cent— with all his eccentricities a high type of civilized 
man. But Constant drew a portrait much truer than 
his own ideas ; for in spite of his hero worship, the 
man who is seen in his pages is not a product of civili- 
zation. He is veneered with a certain respect for con- 
ventionalities, he has a native kindliness of impulse, a 
delight in creative work ; but he is at heart primitive, 
strong, simple, fond of splendor, thirsting for glorj*, at 
once generous and supremely selfish, a powerful intel- 
lect that knows no restraint, in a word, a barbarian 
born out of due time. Thus, unconsciously, Constant 
depicts him. Sucli really Napoleon was. — New York 
Daily Tribune, Friday', Januar}' 17, 1896. 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



21 



sumption of more or less rotten heaps. But 
when the whole atmosphere over an im- 
mense area is completely surcharged with 
brooding smoke, there must have been a 
very extensive conflagration as its origin. 

Curious to say, while engaged upon this 
article, in searching though the dusty 
shelves of the library, which have not been 
examined for a long time, a work was dis- 
covered, the title in full of which is as fol- 
lows, viz: "The Secret History of the 
Court and Cabinet of St. Cloud — in a Series 
of Letters from a Resident in Paris to a 
Nobleman in London, written during the 
months of August, September and October, 
1805." "Philadelphia: Printed for and 
sold by John Watts, North East Corner of 
Second on Dock Street. Sold also by all 
the Principal Booksellers, 1806." 

In some respects this is truly a wonder- 
ful book, because, while it is so severe and 
full of scandal, it goes into statistics and 
assigns to each of the imperial thieves, 
ministers, marshals, &c., the very amounts 
which they had already accumulated. 

In many particulars it is fully endorsed 
by the most trustworthy works in the same 
line, differing in only one particular. Louis 
Buonaparte, who is generally spared, re- 
ceives the lash in these letters. Schlosser 
v\ii, p. 187, remarks: "King Louis of 
Holland has often been accused of peculiari- 
ties, obstinacy and eccentricity, amounting 
even to insanity." Michelet certainly 
charges Buonaparte himself with having 
been beside himself at times. " Lucien 
had the cunning of a fox. Joseph certainly 
was not level-headed where women were 
concerned (see Larpent's Diary, p. 165), 
and Jerome was certainly a despicable char- 
acter. There are stories told of Jerome — 
especially his meanness in connection with 
money matters — that lower him a great 
deal more than established facts in regard 
to his licentiousness and incapacity." 

The writer — last referred to, who pub- 



lished in 1806 — appears in some way to have 
been attached to Lucien, but while endeavor- 
ing apparently to screen and extenuate him, 
he reveals enough to demonstrate what 
immense sums he stole. 

What is most remarkable in this connec- 
tion is the fact that this family, which came 
into France in absolute indigence, went 
out, with the exception of its chief, with 
colossal fortunes,* considering they were 
scattered as cattle, if so, as they deserved, 
as Prince Napoleon declares, and lived and 
diedsurroundedbyelegance and luxury with 
all they loved about them, while the author 
of theirrise and prosperity died a prisoner de- 
prived of the child of his almost idolatrous 
love, and betrayed by the only woman to 
whom he appears to have been really re- 
spectable. 

And now, while upon this subject — these 
scandals, however true or exaggerated — to 
show how utterly untrustworthy are the 
testimonies of such courtiers as Meneval, 
Napoleon's private secretary, he states that 
Marie Loufse saw Neipperg, who became 
her lover, and by whom she had a child or 
children, before her husband, from whom 
she was not divorced, was dead — for the 
first time, at Dresden, in May, 1812. Does 
Meneval make this erroneous or false state- 
ment intentionally? He must have known 
that the contrary was the fact, because 
Marshal de Castellane, in his Diary (Vol. I, 
chap, iii, p. 79), under date of July, 1810, 
records that at Schwartzenberg's ball he 
"drank a glass of champagne with a 
handsome hussar ; his face struck me ; he 
was one-eyed ; this was the Count de Neip- 
perg. I hardly believed that in him I 
should one day see the husband of this 



* ' ' The Bonapartes were divided like a herd of cattle,' ' 
Prince Napoleon observes, page 193, " amongst the ene- 
mies of France. ' ' If the original gnawing poverty and 
struggles for existence be considered they ended their 
lives like princes, and their properties were compara- 
tively colossal for the period. 



22 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



Empress Marie Louise, at whose court he 
was then present, among the great digni- 
taries and the ministers at such brilliant 
f^tes." 

It will be remembered that lately there 
were notices of a drama or a novel founded 
on Buonaparte's jealousy of this Neipperg, 
who is made to follow Marie Louise to Paris 
and was discovered making love to her 
(acceptably?) 

Buonaparte — according to the plot — was 
so infuriated that Neipperg was to be assas- 
sinated, as usual in such cases, or shot, and 
he would have met that fate had he not 
been smuggled out of Paris and France. 
Those who would investigate carefully 
would be disgusted with the depths of 
spiritless servility to which the French 
people, yes, even some of the highest classes 
in Italy, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere, 
church dignitaries, priests and princes, civ- 
ilians and soldiers, sunk, and exhibited in 
regard to Buonaparte. There are plenty 
of books, French, particularly the most re- 
cent, like Bondois, which prove this. 
Still greater disgrace to humanity, how- 
ever, the most servile, in service and flat- 
tery, were the first to desert the tyrant, 
when the arras of outraged F,urope forced 
him to abdicate. 

After reading Castellane is it not more 
than probable that there was some basis of 
fact for this story, and that Meneval deliber- 
ately falsified history to screen his master 
and mistress? 

As to the relations of Buonaparte with 
his most immediate relatives, the following 
from the Bookman^ Vol. II, No. 3, Novem- 
ber, 1895, p. 170, is worthy reflective cour 
sideration : 

" Prof W. M. Sloane, after finishing his 
'Life of Napoleon,' should publish an ap- 
pendix containing the new material which 
he discovered in the course of his researches, 
but did not include in his excellent work. 
For instance, he unearthed, in the Govern- 



mental Archives at Paris, certain letters of 
Pauline Bonaparte^ which he was too vere- 
cund [modest or sly ?] to give to the world 
in a magazine that is largely read by the 
Young Person, but which, nevertheless, 
reveal some very curious and rather re- 
markable facts about the vie intime. * 



*The ' ' London Annual Biography and Obituary, ' ' Vol. 
VI, for the year 1822, furnishes a Memoir, 219 pages, 
octavo, on Napoleon Buonaparte. For an English re- 
view it is wonderfully truthful, although severe, espe- 
cially on "Madame Mere," L^TITIA, "Mother of 
Joy," as d'Herrison says, " the soldiers styled her." It 
charges Buonaparte's paternity to Marboeuf, and ac- 
cording to the laws of heredity, the resemblance of the 
son to the mother is all right. As the stronger creature 
this son should have favored his mother in every re- 
spect. That is" absolute law. Buonaparte was in no 
respect like his father, the husband of his mother, ex- 
cept that both died of a cancer in the stomach, which 
it would be strong proof if some doctors had declared 
that he did not die of that disease, but of a fatal affec- 
tion of the liver, due to his confinement at St. Helena. 
Who shall decide ? 

J. Hereau, former Surgeon-in-Ordinary to Madame 
Mere and first surgeon of the Empress Marie Louise, 
published at Paris, in 1S29 a pamphlet of some 250 
pages - the copy herein cited is either incomplete or 
else breaks off abruptly. It is labelled " for Dr. Jack- 
son," — Dr. Jackson was a famous military surgeon and 
author — and inside is a note, " Will Dr. Jackson be so 
good as to notice this book?" entitled "Napoleon at 
St. Helena. Opinion of a Physician on the Malady of 
the Emperor Napoleon and upon the Cause of His 
Death ; offered to His Son— the Duke de Reichstadt — 
on the Day of Obtaining His Majority." 
At page 160-162, ^Conclusion : 
" It follows from the testimony presented : 
" ist. The Emperor did not die from poison, as is 
still the opinion most generally admitted to-day. 

" 2d. The malady of which he did die was a chronic 
gastritis, a malady which has never been regarded as 
hereditary ; and the traces which it left upon the organs 
of which it was the seat, were very improperly con- 
founded with those of a cancerous affection. 

"3d. Not only the influence of the climate sufficed to 
occasion the iualady of which he died, but to such a 
degree did it alter his constitution that his end was in- 
evitably near at hand. 

"4th. That the vexations of which he was the ob- 
ject, under the title of 'restrictions,' and especially 
the error of his physicians, concurred to hasten his 
death." 

There is doubtless much that is true in No. 4, but the 
' ' vexations ' ' so forcibl)' dwelt upon are undoubtedly at- 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



23 



Sir Hudson Lowe summed up his charac- 
ter when he said Buonaparte was no gen- 
tleman. This judgment is corroborated by 
a thousand instances of bad manners, and 
Talleyrand summed it up when he ob- 
served, "what a pity it is that so able a 
man should have been so badly brought 
up." See Schlosser viii, p. 230, etc. 

Although panderers and flatterers, of all 
degrees and professions, disgraced them- 
selves by the vilest and most blasphemous 
adulations, the Roman Catholic priesthood, 
high and low, degrading themselves by 
leading the choruses and pronouncing dis- 
courses unworthy their profession and their 
dignities, it remained for the usurious and 
money- worshipping race which had hitherto 
respected their religion, to surpass all 
others in associating the principle of evil 
(Buonaparte) with the principle of good 
(Divinity). The story has been told more 
emphatically and diffusely elsewhere, but 
never more clearly and succinctly than by 
William M. Sloane in the February Cen- 
tziry : 

" They [the Jews] vied in flattery with 
the Roman priesthood, setting the Imperial 
Eagle above the Ark of the Covenant, and 
blending the letters N and J with those of 



the Jehovah in a monogram, for the adorn- 
ment of their meeting-place. " 

The ancient and mediaeval Jew could 
never have done this nor been forced into 
doing this by the fiercest tribulations or 
torments. It remained for the modern Jew 
to be false in every sense to Fatherhood. 

Their mingling of the initial letters N 
[what name did N in reality represent?] 
and J of the Imperial Eagle spreading its 
wings dripping with blood over the cherubs 
sheltering with their significant pinions 
the Ark of the Covenant. This horrible 
idea recalls the couplet of the brave but 
barbarian Suworrow after his capture of 
the Turkish fortress, thus converted into 
J English verse by Byron (D. J. IX, stanza 
xxxiii) : 

Glory to God and to the [Empress Catharine II], 

{Powers eternal ! 
Such names mingled ?) Ismail's ours. 

.No'wonder the English bard, with some 
remnant of his national sense of religious 
decency, could apprehend the horrible as- 
sociation in any degree of the infinitely 
: Divine and the infinitely indecent, and yet 
the Germano-Russian Catharine was deci- 
■dedly superior to the Corsican upstart. 
To the Jews to join the remotest sugges- 



tributable to his own unworthy passions, and to physi- 
cians with preconceived opinions, especially of their 
own capacity, are in many cases of more danger toia 
patient than a disease not immediately recognizable 
like small-pox, yellow fever, &c. 

The primary mistake of Sir Hudson Lowe was over- 
politeness to a being to whom politeness, except as a ca- 
jolery or lure, was an unknown quantity. He should 
have acted like Fate, in silence. Napoleon would not 
have dared to resist by force and expose himself to .the 
operation of military law. Power needs no words, be- 
cause it can crush. There is no necessity of argument 
or explanation when an order is clear, and is backed 
with discipline. In many respects the harsher Sir 
Thomas Reade would have been a better jailer than Sir 
Hudson Lowe. 

In Mr. F. A. Ober's Josephine,. Empress of the 
French, we have a work of the J. S. C. Abbott order, 
which, with a delightful disregard of facts and the 



evidence of history, depicts Madame Beauharnais 

; as a persecuted but impeccable being, too good for this 
earth, and naturally much too good for her Corsican 

. husband. It is always pleasant to believe that an 
empress with a romantic history is good and pure and 

■ generally virtuous, but one has to draw the line some- 
where, and we think that we shall draw it at Jose- 
phine. .(The Merriam Company, New York.) From 
,the " Bookman Brevities," p. 540. The Bookman, & 
Literary Journal, published monthly by Dodd, Mead & 

^Co., New York : February, 1896, Vol. II, No. 6. 

This is all fishing in very turbid waters, to use the 
most respectable adjective, but to sum up the whole 
matter and dismiss it at once, the entire gang, male and 
female, in all directions, were a bad lot altogether with 
the sole redeeming admission,, that, as a rule, in one 
line or another, worthy admiration or anathema, as far 
as their own interests were concerned, they were a 
brainy breed. 



24 



Napoleone Dr Buonaparte. 



tion of one combining under the mortal 
viel of devilish cunning a perfect amalgam 
of crime, demonstrates how truly St. Paul 
spoke when he declared "the love of money 
is the root of all evil." 

Sill this is simply a reminder of the 
apothegm of the elders — drawing a distinc- 
tion between the three great class of He- 
brews : In one class, such heroes as stand 
unexceeded in history; in another, of whom 



there were many magnificent examples, 
like the prophets and St. Paul; and in a 
third, which are multitudinous and trans- 
mit the exquisite perception of how to con- 
vert body, soul and spirit simply into the 
service of mammon. 

Some sixty years ago it used to be an ac- 
cepted apotliegm that "Abraham was the 
friend of God, Isaac was a Hebrew gentle- 
man, and Jacob was a Jew." 



IV. 



Beneath a fine lithograph of Willette (Charles Ver- 
neau, editor), entitled "Death Departs in the Fog," rep- 
resenting Buonaparte himself leading the mortuary 
procession of the Empire beneath a funereal sky : " Af- 
ter accomplishing so many prodigies, Buonaparte left 
France enfeebled and impoverished. He himself said, 
while yet First Consul, 'The Future wii,i, TBAch 
IF IT WOni,D NOT HAVE BEEN BETTER FOR THE 
Peace [repos) of the wori,d if I had never ex- 
isted.' In spite of all the glory he won for his (?) 
country, history has not yet answered the question." 

" Ah," cried Buonaparte (1804,) " would to God that 
France had never heard of my name —that her govern- 
ment had never done amiss — that her people had never 
suffered so much misery ! " (Burdon, 1805). He added 
bravely to that misery for the next eleven years until 
Waterloo finished his opportunities to heap more woes 
upon France. 

Buonaparte has not only been compared 
to Attila, but to Zenghis Khan, to Tamer- 
lane, to Darius, and even more than once to 
Xerxes. The conquering arms of the first 
were certainly carried into more extensive 
regions and Tamerlane was a much more 
scientific general than he is conceived to 
have been, except to a few. Darius failed 
against the Scythians for the very same 
reason that Buonaparte did against their 
descendants. Buonaparte's legions never 
inspired such terror as the Tartars down 
to the 13th Century and, as Gibbon ob- 
serves, in 1228, the Swedes and Frieslanders 
were prevented by their fear of the Tartars 
from prosecuting the herring fishery on the 
coast of England. " It is whimsical enough 
that the orders of a Mongol Khan, who 
reigned on the borders of China, should 



have lowered the price of herring in the 
English market." 

It would have been well for Buonaparte 
in 1812, while he imitated the arrogant as- 
surance of Tamerlane, had he taken a leaf 
out of the latter's military book of axioms 
and not pressed on against the advice of his 
best and wisest counsellors. "The Sultan 
himself" (says Timour) "must then put the 
foot of COURAGE into the stirrup of 
PATIENCE." It was impatience that ruined 
Buonaparte and led to his fearful sacrifices 
of life as a military leader. Another of 
Timour's axioms Buonaparte did follow in 
practice — "He who wishes to embrace the 
bride of royalty must kiss her across the 
edge of the sharp sword." (Russia 15, 16, 
17, 30.) Only in Buonaparte's case, in 
kissing the royal bride, the Archduchess, 
Maria Eouisa, the sharp edge cut him, and 
it might be said the wound never com- 
pletely closed, but through it he was 
depleted until his strength oozed away, 
until finally he fell through his "cowardly 
abdication ; " another of his fainting-fits 
[defaillances)^ one of those weaknesses, to 
which Michelet is .so delighted to allude. 

In preparing these articles there is not an 

opinion expressed which has not an au- 

. thority back of it, and some of the severest 

criticisms emanate from Frenchmen and 

were published in Paris. 

The great trouble is, readers who start 
out with a pre-conceived opinion, only dis- 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



25 



cover in the ■ books they read those ideas 
which endorse their own. Thus Thiers — 
who is a Chauvinist of Buonapartists — con- 
tains enough reading between the lines, if 
carefully collocated, to condemn his hero 
in every particular. To exalt the glory of 
France, to feed the inordinate variety of its 
people, French writers are compelled to 
invest Napoleone with their own character- 
istics. Whereas he was a Frenchman in 
nothi ng. 

The fact is, if his glory inures to any 
place and people, it is to Italy and to 
Italians. In starting out with avowed 
hatred to France, Frenchmen were nothing 
else but his dupes, his tools, bodies and 
souls ; his cash in hand, as it were his 
pawns. 

Buonaparte was one of the meanest of 
white men. Besides all the injustices, cap- 
tivities, tortures, military murders, with 
his knowledge or by his direct command, 
the wanton destruction, which he ordered, 
was unworthy of an)' but such a tyrant, 
in gross as well as in detail. He not only 
justified in the atrocious destructions and 
devastations of lyouis XIV, but almost the 
only praise which he accorded to Welling- 
ton—until he was humbled most assuredly, 
and principally by Great Britain — was for 
the Iron Duke's desolation of Portugal in 
1810, to impede the march of Massena and 
make it impossible for the French to re- 
main in the region in front of the lines of 
Torres Viedras. The useless blowing up 
of the Bastions of Vienna was a wanton 
abuse of power, likewise the blowing up of 
the Kremlin and of the ancient walls of 
Smolensko, dirty pieces of low revenge. 
Still, there were other exhibitions of the 
same sort which were perpetrated not 
under the impulse of passion, but out of 
utter wantonness. On the top of a moun- 
tain was a famous old castle, Hohentweil, 
celebrated for its magnificent position and 
views over the siirrounding country, par- 



ticularly the Boden Sea or Lake of Con- 
stance, most particularly for its remarkable 
defence against every power, which in turn 
added misery to misery in Germany during 
the Thirty Years' War. This also was 
blown up in 1800 by the orders of Buona- 
parte according to report. To his most 
ruthless myrmidon, the convict Vac damme, 
without excuse, history accords the de- 
struction of one of the most ancient and re- 
nowned specimens of feudal architecture 
in Europe. It was the scene of the princi- 
pal events in von Scheflfel's " Ekkehard, 
a tale of the Tenth Century." 

In the preceding article the savagery of 
the French in Russia was demonstrated . 
through two anecdotes from General Le- 
jeune. . They might be supported by a 
number of other witnesses ; but turn to 
the Diary of the Marshal de Castellane, 
under the most different circumstances, not 
of suffering, but of success. 

During the "Slaveholders' Rebellion" 
one of the Union soldiers ravished a South- 
ern woman, and he was prompt!}' tried, 
convicted and hung. The same crime in 
the most magnified proportions, seemed but 
slightly regarded among the French. At 
Vol. I, page 25, Castellane records : "Five 
cuirassiers were assigned as safeguards in 
the lodgings of the Chief of the General 
Staff, Forestier, who did not respect their 
hostess. " "A woman related that she had to 
complain of forty soldiers (p. 33)." "The 
majority of the inhabitants having aban- 
doned Burgos, it was given up to pillage. 
A staff officer entered a house and rescued 
an unhappy woman who was in the midst 
of fifty soldiers. Each was waiting his 
turn. " " Sometimes in the midst of horrible 
happenings comic phases occur. In a vil- 
lage, the women to escape the lust {/ureur) 
of the soldiers,- took refuge in the clock 
tower, climbing up the' ladder. The ad- 
vance guard, seeing their prey escape them 
through the arrival of the main body of the 



26 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



regiment and the reestablishment of disci- 
pline, shook their fists ' at their would-be 
victims ' as if the latter had done them a 
wrong." 

It is not often that writers record acts re- 
flecting upon national character, but the 
French seem to do it, as Prime Minister 
Olivier began the war of 1870-71 "with a 
light heart," as if war was to be carried on 
according to the principle that the soldiers 
must be allowed to amuse themselves, 
just as Tilly said, when he permitted 
that most horrible of all sacks, the sack of 
Magdeburg. 

There is as much difference between 
moral and physical courage as there is be- 
tween the tropics and the poles. To im- 
pute want of personal physical bravery to 
any people or individual influenced by self- 
respect is a folly and an injustice. Moral 
courage of a high grade is just as uncom- 
mon as the want of physical courage, indi- 
vidual or national, when roused to the occa- 
sion. Austria would never have sunk so 
low in 1797, 1800, 1805 and 1809 if want of 
moral courage had not been the chief defect 
in her rulers — Austria, said to be " always an 
idea, a battle and a year behind time. " The 
same was the case in Prussia in 1806, down 
to 1813. And it was this want of moral 
fortitude and rectitude — not the mere dread 
of death — which was the cause of all the 
woes of Continental Europe between 1793 
and 1813. The exhibition of this grand 
quality was first encountered in Russia in 
1812. Francis I and Frederick William 
III, "rex Infirmissimus," Francis I worse, 
but more stubborn and cunning, and, as a 
rule, with exceptions, seemed to have no 
more real backbone than a sturgeon. Noth- 
ing stopped Buonaparte's climb to universal 
empire but the inflexible moral vigor of 
England, Great Britain- was the barrier 
between freedom and slavery and the sa- 
vior of the continental thrones. Not but 
that Great Britain is as full of defects in 



many important particulars,- subordinated 
to a selfishness and arrogance, which would 
be intolerable in any but a government 
which, in its Anglo-Saxon Protestant free- 
dom, has been for centuries the breakwater 
to restrain the waves of despotism, physical 
and spiritual. To conclude for the present, 
doubtless good was evolved out of the evil 
of Buonaparte's career, but that good was 
already germinating before, like a baleful 
comet, he made his appearance in Euro- 
pean skies. Although it is said that the 
best crop of wine ever produced in France 
was due to the presence of a comet before 
Buonaparte had attained incipient manhood, 
Thurot, eminently his superior as an admin- 
istrator, had striven to introduce wiser re- 
forms in France than any attributed to the 
Corsican upstart. Stein regenerated Prus- 
sia against Buonaparte's will. Even in 
Austria the Archduke Charles perceived 
and declared that Europe could never be 
saved otherwise than by men not in the posi- 
tion of princes. The fact is that everything 
which is generally held to be truth is apo- 
chryphal. Take, for instance, Buonaparte's 
health. He was an epileptic, and subject 
to a variety of diseases, which, although 
latent, were patent to those immediately 
about him if they had chosen to tell the 
truth. These became greatly aggravated 
by his increased and increasing self-indul- 
gence after his marriage in 1809. They 
were manifest in Russia ; still more so in 
1813. In 1814, his attempt at suicide is not 
only uncertain, but almost apochryphal. 
In 1815, his exhibitions of whatever ability 
he had previously displayed were sporadic, 
and in the campaign of Waterloo these were 
dreams which may be justly compared to 
those flashes of lightning which illuminate 
a tempestuous night and leave the darkness 
blacker than before. 

In 1812, Buonaparte's criminal ambition 
had developed into absolute lunacy at times 
(see Henry Wansey's "Visit to Paris in 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



27 



June, 1814,"- pp. 90, 97, &c.), and he 
hurled his armies against space and climate; 
against a camp of patriotism, impregnable 
in its sparsely peopled vastness and its ex- 
tremes of climate. Inotherwords, thedespot 
could mould men to his will, but his poten- 
tial autocracy was as feeble as a child's 
against natural dynamics. Again, those 
who measure Napoleon's greatness with 
the rod of adulation and touchstone of 
French vanity, are purblind as to the fact 
that the glory of his falsely so-styled French 
successes must be shared with other races. 

He undoubtedly began his ascent chiefly 
through Frenchmen, but gradually increas- 
ing strength acquired rather by guile and 
greed, fraud and falsehood, than by arms, 
he added people to people, until in 181 2 he 
led against Russia an army styled of 
"twenty nations," but nearer in reality 
of forty victimized nations. Slaves is perhaps 
a more fitting term, impelled by a pitiless 
discipline of "blood and iron" to fight 
against their own people, their own feel- 
ings, their own interests. 

The armies which Napoleon originally 
commanded were as fine as the best that 
were ever assembled under any otherleader, 
and they were opposed to automatons who 
could die, but could not die fighting — as 
one of our most scientific generals said of 
the Mexicans — under a set of old fogies. 

This is conceded by all military critics. 
And yet, with all his advantages in 1797, 
Buonaparte was in a pit, and a deep one, 
from which weak Austrian timidity and 
stupidity and cupidity were kind enough 
to help him out. 

His next adventure, in Egypt, which is 
best known through his charlatan watch- 
word, "from the summit of the Pyramids 
forty centuries look down upon the French 
army," and his cruel raid, or razzia, into Sy- 
ria, were as complete failures in a military 
sense as any ever undertaken and were her- 
alded with flourishes of trumpets, such as a 



quack salver was wont to blow, and with bass 
drum to announce his arrival to his dupes. 
Honest French critics charge he deserted his 
army when he saw that his game was up, 
as he always deserted it whenever his own 
selfish interests were in the balance against 
duty to those he was sacrificing. 

Buonaparte had a most plausible tongue. 
In honeyfugling he was unsurpassed. As 
Admiral Keith said when Buonaparte de- 
sired to obtain an interview with the Prince 
Regent of England, "Damn the fellow; if 
it was granted, in half an hour they would 
be the best friends in the world." And 
yet, when his temper got the better of his 
cunning, he could use as coarse language 
as is heard in the slums, so that no one has 
ever dared to translate into English, liter- 
ally, many of the expressions he habitually 
used. His slanderous tongue spared no one. 
Witness the foul aspersions upon Queen 
Louisa, one of the noblest and loveliest 
specimens of womanhood. He even dared 
to impugn her chastity, and the sting of 
this devilish lie did so much to rouse the 
indignation of her people against the Slan- 
derer, in 1813. He was in a hole at Ma- 
rengo when Desaix extricated him, and his 
repetitions of reports or narratives of that 
battle were only successive falsifications 
modified to centre all the glory in himself 
and obscure that of every other who de- 
served more than he. Who killed Desaix ? 
It has been charged to Buonaparte's "Man- 
darin for all work," who tried his "'pren- 
tice hand " on this occasion, so unfortunate 
for France. 

Buonaparte was in another trap when he 
was suffered to achieve his greatest triumph 
at Austerlitz, in 1805. Austrian want of 
moral back-bone even more kindly than in 
1797, aided him to climb out. 

In 1799, however brilliant the feats of 
arms performed by his subordinates, his 
utter reverse before Acre, besides his whole- 
sale murders, as at JaS"a, resulted in that 



28 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



abandonment which brought him back to 
France stigmatized as the "Deserter from 
Egypt," when he was declared by honest 
men as worthy of being shot and by the 
more violent of being guillotined. 

In 1806, amid the hundreds of thousands 
who fought under the Black Eagle, how 
few did honor to the example of the "great 
Frederick." The Prussian heroes of 1806 
can almost be counted upon the fingers of 
the hands — Blucher standing first and 
highest. 

From the parallel between Attila and 
Buonaparte was omitted the only type of a 
struggle to redeem the German national 
honor, a type of Blucher's glorious stand 
at Lubeck. Otherwise it was a walk-over 
for Buonaparte. 

History records but one attempt made to 
oppose the progress of Attila on the right 
bank of the Rhine, the heroic opposition 
of 10,000 Burgundians under Gunthachar, 
who fought and fell like a second Leonidas, 
[or like Blucher's return-blow or counter 
at Lubeck in 1806.] 

One incident which has been blazoned 
in a thousand pages, as an instance of mag- 
nanimity — his coming short of shooting 
Prince Hatzfeldt was "astage trick, playing 
to the galleries." If he had caused him to 
be shot it would have been as much a cold- 
blooded murder as many of the numerous 
others which he committed, the crudest, 
that of the Duke d'Enghien and the mean- 



" The storm [Attila' s invasion, A. D. 451] now burst 
upon Germany. Desolation, rapine, and slaughter 
marked its advance towards Gaul. Obscure 1 egendary 
accounts of the horrors of that period are still extant. 
All the relics and jewels belonging to the church, still 
in its infancy, were saved at Andecks, on the moun- 
tain, from the rapacity of the invaders. Wimpfen 
owes its name to WI3PIN, [We iberpem , ^o'mea^ s pain,) 
all the women of this place having been cruelly mur- 
dered by Attila's command, and several Huunenberge, 
Hunnengraben, (fortifications against the Huns,) are 
stUl to be met with in Germany, although it is uncer- 
tain whether they ought not to be ascribed to the Hun- 
garians of later date, who were also called Huns. ' ' 



est that of the poor innocent bookseller, 
Palm. 

A single pair of battles, twins in 1806, 
served to dispose of Prussian resistance — 
Jena and Auerstadt ; Buonaparte won the 
first with great odds in his favor and Davout 
the other, with great odds against him ; 
and, yet, all the glory was claimed for • 
Buonaparte and by Buonaparte, and except 
that Davout was afterwards rewarded with 
a title, very few knew or know that his 
triumph was the crowning success of the 
war, perhaps of Buonaparte's whole life, 
or career. 

In 1807 when Buonaparte encountered 
the Russians, assisted by the real Prussians, 
under a man somewhat of Blucher's stamp, 
of Huguenot descent, Lestocq, it was a dif- 
ferent story. At Preuss-Eylan the moral 
victory was with his enemies, and about no 
battle except Waterloo did he lie so unblush- 
ingly and persistently. On either side thei^e 
was a loss of over 18,000. The Russians re- 
treated because they were destitute of food, 
and Buonaparte to recruit, for his army was 
shaken up and almost shattered. 

At Tilsit he cajoled and bought Alexan- 
der ; but, while he duped the Czar, it is 
said that he did not even touch a cup of 
tea prepared by Russian hands, so fearful 
was he of being poisoned — self-conscious of 
how many that stood in his way had op- 
portunely perished. It was said of Cardi- 
nal Richelieu that he was most fortimate, 
in that every one who threatened to become 
an obstacle to his plans always died or dis- 
appeared at exactly the right moment. 
Buonaparte endeavored to imitate the 
greatest of French administrators. 

The right to sit in judgment upon even 
the worst of criminals pre-supposes the pos- 
session of an impartiality which can only 
be influenced by evidence and is inacces- 
sible to prejudice or feeling. In the case 
of a prosecuting attorney it is entirely 
different. If he is not affected by a just 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



29 



ambition to convict, and the jury and jndge 
perceive the want of it in him, in most in- 
stances he misses his aim. Like the Advo- 
catus Diaboli, the Roman Ecclesiastical 
Court, engaged in the examination of the 
records of an applicant for beatification 
or sanctification, it is the bounden duty of 
the people's Advocate to look for every flaw 
in character aud career which can prevent 
a favorable verdict. Napoleone di Buona- 
parte having so nearly escaped deification 
at the hands of his servile, interested or 
fanatic worshippers, it is now the duty of 
an advocate of Truth to come forward and 
present every piece of evidence against him 
which can be discovered, and none should 
be rejected until rebutted by absolute facts 
— not the prejudiced or partial testimony 
of, in too many cases, suborned or ignorant 
partisans. * 



*Memoires, pour Servir a I'Histoire sous le Direc- 
toire, le Consulat, et I'Empire, par Le Marechal 
GouviON Saint Cyr, Tome iii, 1812, and iv, 18:3, 
Paris Anailen, Lebraire pour I'Art MiHtaire, 1831. 

I wish to call the reader's attention to what is a 
matter of pride, namely, that all the conclusions 
reached and stated in previous works were published 
before the receipt from Europe of the Memoirs of 
Marshal Gouvion Saint Cyr, who, it is conceded, was 
one of the very ablest of Buonaparte's lieutenants, 
and who did not attain the most important commands 
—not by any means because he was unequal to them, 
but because he was not sufficiently a courtier ; be- 
cause he held to his own opinions and would express 
them — in fact he was too independent — and, finally, 
because some of his characteristics made him by no 
means always agreeable for subordinates, or even 
equals or superiors. No one has, however, ever 
denied his ability ; therefore the criticisms of so calm 
and cold and capab'e observer are invaluable. 

In the "conclusions" to his third and fourth 
volumes, he endorses every opinion expre.ssed by the 
writer, and goes a great deal farther in his severe 
judgment upon Buonaparte ; because, harsh as have 
been the expressions lavished by him upon Saint 
Cyr's superior, those of Saint Cyr are harsher, al- 
though perhaps more respectful in their language, 
which was politic. 

Saint Cyr condemns the whole plan and execution 
of the Russian campaign, reveals truths never ad- 
mitted by admirers of Buonaparte, charges him with 
a great blunder at Smolensko, and concedes his 



In the gallery of portraits of the celebri- 
ties of the portentous epoch between the 
execution of lyouis XVI and the second re- 
storation of Louis XVIII, there is none 
more striking than that of Jean Antoine 
Chaptal, Count of Chanteloup. It is not 
only attractive in its traits, but they are 
radiant with unusual intellectuality and 
acute intelligence. That he was a scientist 
of the highest order, who to technical 
knowledge added the grandest powers of 
its practical application, is established not 
only by his books, but by his works. 
Better than all, with all these mental gifts, 
his energy, his devotedness, condoned his 
association with some of the greatest vil- 
lains that ever existed, and he began, con- 
tinued, lived and died an honest man. One 
of the best proofs perhaps that he was an 
honest man is that his name does not ap- 

leadership at Borodino was far below the occasion. 
To go into details which could be understood by 
laymen would require a dilatation of double the 
pages (Vol. iii, 1812, 51 ; and Vol. iv, 1813, 58 ; to- 
gether 109 1 filled with language so nervous and con- 
cise as Saint Cyr's presentation of his views. 

Although he does not say so in so many words. 
Saint Cyr perfectly agrees with the opinion of 
Morlau, Kleber, and other great French and foreign 
generals, that Buonaparte was not a scientific com- 
mander ; that he trusted to luck and prodigal ex- 
penditure of invaluable life ; that he was by no means 
bold and decided when luck and men failed him ; 
that he was great for the offensive in his reckless stak- 
ing of the result on his destiny ; that he was a leader 
in the style of Attila and Genghis Khan ; and that he 
was wanting in perseverance and calmness for a suc- 
cessful defensive. This was Wellington's opinion 
also. In these military considerations he admits 
all that one who holds Buonaparte in holy horror 
could wish, and, what is more and better, unlike 
Frenchmen generally, he does not beat about the 
bush and cover up the falsehoods in regard to the 
terrible expenditure of life with which Buonaparte 
purchased success, and he avows that in some of the 
victories won, according to general opinion, with 
inferior forces, Buonaparte, if he did not have a vast 
superiority in numbers, was undoubtedly superior to 
his opponents in every element on which a com- 
mander can calculate with precision for achieving a 
triumph over less trustworthy forces. Personal and 
Material. 



30 



Napoleoisje di Buonaparte. 



pear in the French Dictionnaire de Gi- 
rouette^ s (Weathercocks), whose servility 
always pointed in the direction of the wind 
of Buonaparte's favor. Again that Buona- 
parte himself does not notice him among 
his Biographical References is most likely 
due to the fact, that with all his brazen ef- 
frontry and disregard of human feeling, he 
dared not mention him, remembering with 
what utterly brutal blackguardism, as was 
stated by Chaptal himself, he treated a faith- 
ful servant. 

The list of the scientific works, treatises 
and papers of which M. DE Chaptal was 
author is astounding. It fills in smallest 
type six pages of the 8vo. Life and Labors 
{Vie et r CEiiv7'e) of Chaptal, Paris, 1893. 

j|@"The real cause of Chaptal's throw- 
ing up his ministerial functions was entirely 
different from that alleged by Meneval. * 

*Chaptal- (Jean Antoine), Count de Chanteloup, an 
eminent French chemist, born at Nogaret, Lozere, 
June 5, 1756. He graduated as M. D. at Montpellier, 
in 1777. and became professor of chemistry at that 
place in 1781. He supported the popular cause of the 
Revolution, and introduced the manufacture of cer- 
tain chemicals for which France had previously been 
dependent on foreigners. About 1796 he was chosen 
a member of the Institute. He was Minister of the 
Interior for five years (1S01-05), and afterwards a 
Senator. Treasurer of the Senate, etc. His chief works 
are "Chemistry Applied to the Arts" (1806), and 
"Elements of Chemistry." Died in 1832. (See 
Floureus "Eloge Historique de Chaptal," 1835. 
"Johnson's Universal Cyclopaedia," Vol. I, 876. 

"The Minister of the Interior was at that time 
M. Chaptal. He was not only a very distinguished 
savant ; but his varied knowledge of agricultural and 
commercial matters, his application of chemistry to 
the industries and the arts, his talents as administra- 
tor, and his studies on public education, had pointed 
him out as the right man to direct a minisiry so wide 
and so varied in its duties." Memoirs Illustrating 
the History of Napoleon from 1802 to 1815, by Baron 
Napoleon Joseph de MenEval. Vol. I : New York, 
1894, pp. 140-1. 

"It was durmg one of his stays at Calais that 
Napoleon deprived M. Chaptal of his portfolio as 
Minister of the Interior. This department was en- 
trusted to M. Portalis, Minister of Public Worship, 
pending the appointment of a successor to M. 



According to " Za Vie et V OEuvre^''^ etc., 
of the Viscount An. Chaptal, the Count re- 
signed the ministry of the Interior after 
four years' faithful service, 5th of August, 
1804, because he would not submit like 
many others to the brutality of Buonaparte, 
which for tlie sake of their interests many 
humbly accepted while kissing the hand 
which inflicted the insult. The Viscount 
writes : " The public already are ac- 
quainted through the Biographic Michaud^ 
with the relations which existed between 

Chaptal, an event which took place two days later, 
M. de Champagny being nominated Minister of the 
Interior. M. Chaptal entered the Senate. I have 
heard Napoleon complaining about this minister on 
the ground that he did not take any opportunities of 
speaking to him, that their personal relations were 
too few and far between, and that he too rarely in- 
formed him of the various affairs which were being 
dealt with in his department. It may be that the 
Emperor yielded to certain prejudices, which were 
inspired by his recollections of the failure of the 
experiment he had tried in entrusting the same 
ministry to Laplace, who had to be replaced by 
Lucien Bonaparte. He may have thought that 
savants lost by being diverted from their studies, and 
were incapable of devoting themselves entirely to the 
numerous details of a great administration. This was, 
however, not the case with M. Chaptal, who was a 
practical savant. As a matter of fact, however, he 
continued to enjo}' Napoleon's favor and esteem. 
The Emperor took constant opportunities of showing 
this distinguished savant the high esteem in which he 
held his talents, and gave him many proofs of his 
favorable disposition towards him." 

These remarks constitute one of the instances of 
either the untrustworthiness or dissimulation of 
Meneval's Memoirs or his ignorance of what was 
occurring, as it were, under his own eyes, which, how- 
ever, must have been an utter impossibility since the 
newspapers revealed the causes of Chaptal's resigna- 
tion, not removal or dismissal, or as alluded to in my 
Authorities on Waterloo and Napoleon Buonaparte. 
Meneval was often gmlty of misrepresentation to white- 
wash each successive stain upon the character of his 
idol. 

If Buonaparte felt such a "favorable disposition" 
towards Chaptal as Meneval states and held him in 
"high esteem," the more inexcusably disgraceful his 
conduct towards him in regard to Chaptal's chere 
aniie. 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



31 



Chaptal and Mile. Bourgoin of the French 
Comedy. It is no longer a family secret 
and I have no scruple to allude to it. It is 
well known that Napoleon, if he took it 
into his head to satisfy a fancy, never hesi- 
tated to wound the feelings of those upon 
whom he set the highest value. Mile. 
Bourgoin had become an object of desire to 
the Emperor and my ancestor would not 
put up with it. The simple fact is this, 
the matter was ventilated in the public 
prints and family tradition adds confirma- 
tion. Napoleon was working one evening 
with Chaptal when the arrival of Mile. 
Bourgoin was announced to him. The 
Emperor begged her to wait for him. It 
was a theatrical situation which he had got 
up on purpose. Chaptal placed his papers 
in his portfolio and left at once. The same 
night he prepared his resignation. ' ' Masson 
in his "Napoleon and the Female Sexe," 
IOI-2 Paris, 1894, tells the story more at 
length but certainly makes it appear more 
to the disadvantage of Buonaparte. The 
truth is Buonaparte was inherently a black- 
guard and never acquired decent manners. 
He never received any more polish than 
was the result of the necessity, at times 
assuming a virtue which he did not possess, 
in order to cajole or deceive where he could 
not browbeat, bull}' and coerce. 

Meneval, who misrepresents almost every- 
thing to exalt Buonaparte, iii. 21, tells the 
exact truth when he says he was the "most 
amiable and charming of men ivhen he chose 
to show himself as siichV 

Some of the details of the quarrels of 
Buonaparte and his family gave occasion to 
scenes and language worthy of the lowest 
classes. When Buonaparte reproached his 
brother Lucien, which Chaptal (259) relates 
briefly and decently, for having married a 
widow, Lucien answered: "And thou 
likewise, thou didst marry a widow, but 
mine is neither old nor stinking {puaiite).^' 
Josephine and her daughter Hortense, how- 



ever lovely and amiable, had a disagreeable 
defect. 

Although this series of articles has been 
criticised as too severe on the " Corsican 
Ogre," one sentence in the notice in the 
^^ Bookbziyer^'' sums up the matter: "There 
was nothing natural about Napoleon," says 
the author, "except his selfishness." To 
that selfishness may be traced all his crimes 
of great or less magnitude. That is the 
absolute fact, and if the same process could 
be applied to him, Buonaparte, to which 
Byron alludes in a stanza of his " Don 
Juan," it will be found that the sublime 
residuum — to which the poet refers with the 
precision of experience — in the mass of 
Buonaparte's composition, morals and mat- 
ter, was utter devotion solely to his own 
self-interest. 

" I'll have another figure in a trice : — 

What say you to a bottle of champagne ? 

Frozen into a very vinous ice. 

Which leaves few drops of that iminortal rain, 

Yet in the very centre, past all price. 

About a liquid glassful will remain ; 

And this is stronger than the strongest grape 

Could e'er express in its expanded shape : 

'Tis the whole spirit brought to quintessence ; 

And thus the chilliest aspects may concentrate 

A hidden nectar under a cold presence." — 

In Buonaparte the 'quintessence was a sel- 
fishness to which he sacrificed the souls 
and substance of every one and everything 
in his empire who had not the spirit or op- 
portunity to escape its oppression. 

Salvandy, a great admirer of him, wound 
up his sketch by stating that he fell because 
he was incapable of justice : His judg- 
ments, his statements, his praises, his re- 
wards, were all the result of his sole 
thought — self! self! self! 

Whatever were the relations of Josephine 
to Barras, Napoleon owed everything to 
Barras, whatever may have been the terms 
of the two sides to the bargain. It gave 
him that command which was the spring- 
board which enabled him to leap from pov- 



32 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



erty and obscurity to power and renown. 
It is stated that Sobieski — when his at- 
tention was called before the great battle 
which delivered Vienna in 1683 to a Polish 
Foot Regiment, which appeared like a set of 
scarecrows — said to the Imperial scoffers, 
looking on, "those men have sworn never 
to put off their rags until they can clothe 
themselves by captures from the enemy." 
The historian's comment upon this was 
"these words were sufficient to, convert a 
regiment of tatterdemallions into a regi- 
ment of heroes." 

This anecdote exactly applies to Buona- 
parte's assumption of the command of the 
army of Italy. He appealed to every in- 
stinct which could make it, like Sobieskie's 
Poles, an army of heroes, adding the most 
inflammable fuel to the fire of revolutionary 
enthusiasm. When, in after years, Buona- 
parte cast the slur upon Augerean that he 
was no longer the Augerean of 1796-1797, 
the hero of Castiglione — where he saved 
Buonaparte in one of his weakenings — the 
Marshal replied that "he would be the 
same Augerean if he had with him the sol- 
diers of the period referred to," whom 
Buonaparte had wasted as if such soldiers 
as he threw away could be replaced. 

The British general's fjohn Mitchell) view 
of that Revolutionary or Republican Army 
in his unequalled " Fall of Napoleon" (124) 
was fully justified: "It must be allowed that 
these first Republican armies were in spirit, 
composition and honorable feeling, far su- 
perior to the best of their successors ; and 
the old French officers, who served in the 
campaigns of 1793 and 1794, and afterwards 
rose to rank under Napoleon, always spoke 
with MORE RESPECT of these early 
SOLDIERS OF THE REVOLUTION than of the 
Imperial Guard itself" 

When those glorious spirits had been 
dissipated and, step by step, by the abuse of 
power, Buonaparte had acquired the pos- 
session of a sceptre, at whose wave one 



hundred millions bowed in servile, blas- 
phemous servility, as before a very God, 
body, soul and spirit, morals, princi- 
ples and conscience, he was enabled to 
gather together hundreds of thousands 
of armed men or less disciplined 
victims, — "cannon-food," as he justly 
termed them — they were no longer compe- 
tent to meet on equal terms the legions 
which his cruelty, greed and pitiless injus- 
tice had invested with all the patriotic en- 
thusiasm which the French had possessed, 
when Buonaparte's star first rose. 

In the very year in which Napoleon was 
smitten down, Francia became Dictator of 
Paraguay, and acquired that one-man 
power which converted the government of 
that country into a simple machine of 
which the whole population and products 
served as fuel, and resulting power worked 
solely for his own personal benefit. Francia 
ruled over a semi-barbarous people, a tyrant 
\n petto, as Buonaparte over a highly civil- 
ized population, was a tyrant in maximo. 
Nevertheless Francia's despotism was not 
more absolute, more penetrating, more per- 
vading, more exhausting and more crush- 
ing, than was Buonaparte's over France 
and other highly civilized nations — a des- 
potism like the circle in the water, growing 
wider and wider, until it broke against the 
barrier of England, upon the sea, and of 
Russia's natural impregnability. 

According to Chaptal's ^^ Soiivenirs de 
Napoleo7t,^^ if the small number of writ- 
ings, which will be handed down to pos- 
terity and which can transmit some trust- 
worthy information concerning him [Buon- 
aparte], are consulted there will be 
foimd on the one side the most disgusting 
apology for the qualities and virtues of 
the hero, and on the other the most hide- 
ous portrayal of his vices and of his ambi- 
tion. The first represent him as a tute- 
lary god or deity, invested with every 
[grand] quality, with every virtue — think- 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



33 



ing, acting, breathing only for the welfare 
of humanity ; the second accord to him 
neither talent nor {moyens) parts or powers. 
According to the latter, his successes were 
the result of chance, his elevation the result 
of audacity and perversity. Both judge 
him with passion, and posterity can form 
no exact idea of this extraordinary man, bas- 
ing it upon the writings which have been 
published to date (1817). 

" As I was charged with important public 
functions during the reign of Napoleon, 
and enjoyed very intimate relations with 
him for sixteen years I was able to study 
and appreciate him. I was able to do this 
with greater success, becairse while near 
him I constantly acted as an impassable 
(unbia.=sed) observer. I believe that I have 
never made any allusion either to his de- 
fects or to his [good] qualities. Thus, to- 
day, 1817, that he is dead for his contem- 
poraries, I can show display these notes set 
down, after associating with him, in which 
I literally express the opinion which I pre- 
sent in the course of this work, ' My Re- 
collections of Napoleon.' I call him Bona- 
parte, because during the Italian campaign, 
in which he covered himself with glory, he 
suppressed the 'u' in his name, so as no 
longer to appear of foreign origin. His 
mother, L,aetitia Fesch, was a very beautiful 
woman, and it is to her liaisons* [whatever 
Chaptal means by that term] with M. de 
Marbeuf, Governor of Corsica, that the 
young Napoleon owed the opportunity to 
enter upon a military career and obtain a 
gratuitous scholarship in the Royal School 
of Briennef (187). Paoli said to Volney 



*According to the Century Dictionary the primary 
meaning of this word, as it is used by Froude in his 
"Ceesar," signifies an illicit intimacy between a man 
and a woman. Same definition in Funk & Waguall. 



that this young man carried the head of 
Caesar upon the body of Alexander, and 
that in him were ten Syllas (examine Chap- 
tal, pages 205, 206). 

In the course of these pages mention 
has been repeatedly made of the Tribun- 
ate. This was constituted almost entirely 
of men who had displayed the most con- 
spicuous talent during the different phases 
of the Revolution, who discussed the prop- 
ositions for laws, and sent to the legis- 
lative body deputies to defend them 
or to attack them concurrently with the 
Commissioners of the Council of State. 
The unquiet spirit of the first Consul 
soon became irritated at the obstacles 
which he found [in the admirable con- 
servative arrangements of the constitu- 
tional checks] which opposed the exe- 
cution of his plans. The digested and 
salutary opposition of the Tribunate to 
certain laws displeased him. The com- 
plaints presented to the commission of the 
Senate in favor of individtial liberty and 



fHazlitt in one of his treatises on "Depth and Super- 
perficiality," (Bohn's edition, "The Plain Speaker, 4S9,) 
declares that, and demonstrates how, in tlie infant, in 
the cradle, exist, latent, the germs of all the good and 



bad, the strength and weakness, which gradually de- 
velop and characterize the mature individual. If the 
following anecdote is true, Chaptal simply corrobo- 
rates Hazlitt and proves the truth of the proverb, 
" the child is the father of the man." One day when 
M. de Marbeuf was speaking of the means which he 
was about to employ to pacify Corsica : "Bah!" re- 
plied Buonaparte, then between ten and twelve years 
old, rudely, "Ten days of the rule of a [Turkish] 
Pacha would do more to pacify Corsica than ten years 
of your government," and he went off to his room 
where he spent his time reading, particularly histori- 
cal works. 

Is it likely that Marbeuf would have put up with 
such disrespect from a child if there had been no 
closer tie between them than merely that of protege 
and preceptor ? These words exactly present Buona- 
parte in power. The rule of a Pacha implied the 
sword, the stake, rape, robbery, even extermination, 
if necessary, as at Scio or Chios, nth April, 1S22, the 
extreme measures of an Attila, a Timour, a Genghis. 
It was exactly Buonaparte's methods— witness Pavia 
in 1796, Jaffa in 1799, Burgos in 180S, all under his 
own eyes ; his orders to his lieutenants, his injunc- 
tions, his counsels. Ali Pacha was scarcely more cruel 
through policy or Djezzar Pacha through disposition. 



34 



NAPOLEONE DI BUONAPARTE. 



the reclamations of the commission annoyed 
[or incommoded] him. He suppressed the 
Tribunate, and he said to me the same 
evening, "from this moment there is no 
longer any constitution. " Then he organ- 
ized a military force which executed his 
decrees without any observation (remark), 
and his ministers, which his constitutional 
formsshackled in their movements, executed 
decrees without opposition. 

' 'A sufficient number will describe his cam- 
paigns and will judge his policy and his gov- 
ernment. I, who have particularly observed 
him in his home, am about to penetrate into 
his private life, and while divesting him of 
all the glitter of his greatness and the illus- 
ion of his victories, confine myself to making 
known his tastes, his character, his prin- 
ciples, his affections, his judgments upon 
men and things. 

"The world will be astonished perhaps 
with the freedom afforded him to bring 
about all changes for subverting public 
liberty. But this astonishment will cease 
when the public reflect that there was a 
general fondness for him individually ; and 
it will be observed that his armies were con- 
stantly victorious ; and that public opinion 
proclaimed him the only man capable of 
making France respected without, in sup- 
pressing factions not entirely extinct within. 
His wars were regarded, as yet, less as the 
insatiable thirst of an immoderate ambition 
than as measures which the glory and the 
safetyofthestate required. Only the abilities 
of the man were perceived ; his defects were 
imperfectly apprehended. Thus four millions 
of Frenchmen proclaimed him Fmperor. 
Little did they then imagine that they were 
laying out the road to tyranny. The armed 
force was entirely in his hands and all were 
disposed to execute his orders, so that he 
had reached a point where he found no op- 
position. Often even it happened in the 
Council of State to close the discussion which 
he himself had opened, and bitterly to in- 



sult those who seemed about to raise some 
question as to the validity of one of his 
propositions. The result [obtained thus by 
despotic bullying] nevertheless appeared to 
the public as having been the result of 
careful deliberation in the Council of State. 
In fact the Empire had arrived at the epoch 
when there was alieady no longer any 
public liberty, because there was neither 
counterpoise nor balance in the powers. 

* * Independent of the absolute charac- 
ter of Napoleon, which suffered neither dis- 
cussion nor opposition when his opinion 
was formed and through that alone could 
only be based on despotism. * * He 
added that it was only ancient dynasties 
which could be popular with impunity. 

* * Within and withoiit I only reign 
through the fear which I inspire. If I aban- 
don this system I should soon be dethroned. 

* * Thus he believed that in his position 
it was more sagacious to be feared than to 
be loved. He thought very little of Henry 
IV, and was indignant that this prince de- 
sired to be called the ' Good Henry.' ' The 
'Sluggard Kings,' he added, 'were like- 
wise good sovereigns.' Philip the Hand- 
some and Louis XI [cruel, unprincipled 
sovereigns like himself] were the only 
kings of the third race whom he esteemed. 
Perhaps it would have been possible to have 
restrained Buonaparte within just limits if 
his first breaking bounds had been rectified 
[repressed] by the higher state authorities 
at the beginning of his career ; then without 
doubt the nation would have endorsed its 
most exalted magistrates. Moreover [then?] 
this man Buonaparte feared the people. 
The least discontent boldly manifested, the 
most insignificant insurrection affected him 
more than the loss of a battle ; but from 
the moment that this man found himself at 
the head of an army puffed up with its suc- 
cesses, he held in his hands the instrument 
of our [French] servitude. All resistance 
became impossible ; the nation itself through 



NAPOLEONE DI BUONAPARTE. 



35 



vanity [self-conceit?] (amour-propre) asso- 
ciated itself with his successes, and civil 
rights no longer counted for anything." 

See Chaptal (224.) Profoundly ignorant 
of ideas of government. Dreamed, never 
studied. His reputed knowledge of math- 
ematics of no account. 

(225.) Misused words in a ridiculous man- 
ner. 

(226-7.) Despised the counsels of the wise. 

(227). He wanted servile boot-licks {Va- 
lets) and not advisers. 

(228.) He conceived the project of form- 
ing a generation of Seids [i. e. irresponsible 
executors of his will, like Turkish mutes 
with the bowstring]. 

Buonaparte had applied his system of 
fusion to every country which became sub- 
ject to him. He exacted that the children 
of every country thus absorbed should be 
brought up in France. He forced the most 
patriotic in these annexes to sell the prop- 
erty at home, to place the product {bien- 
fonds) in real estate in the interior of 
France, which, like the seizure of com- 
munal properties, amounted in many cases 
in the end to virtual confiscation. It was 
on a par with its compulsory marriage of 
heiresses, of whom his local satraps were 
compelled to make out lists and valuations 
to marry (in so many cases) his brutal, dis- 
sipated, unprincipled officers or officials. 
[This was one of the severest charges made 
by Lord Castelreagh in Parliament and it 
excited the ire of Las Cases, who never 
hesitates at contradiction of facts besmirch- 
ing his idol.] 

[There was no distinction of persons with 
Buonaparte. Some he regarded as spies, 
watching for the moment when fortune 
should prove adverse to him to win back 
what they had lost.] No fears that his 
Star would ever pale entered Buonaparte's 
mind. He believed himself strong enough 
to shackle everything and enslave every- 
thing-. 



[The unreflecting vast majority, hypno- 
tized by iuch writers as Abbott, regard 
Buonaparte as sagacity incarnate. No 
man made more or greater and more stupid 
blunders.] 

The favor which he had won among the 
people by the reestablishment of public 
worship turned into hatred of him as soon 
as he began his controversies with the 
Pope. * * His quarrels with the Pope 
alienated almost every heart * * thus 
the effect was directly opposite to what he 
expected * * he tormented the aged 
Pope in every possible manner. [It has 
been claimed that he struck him and seized 
him by the hair.] 

[Wellington was of opinion that Napoleon 
was more afraid of his Marshals than his 
Marshals were of him.] Chaptal says 
Napoleon was unceasingly on his guard 
against the ambition of his generals and 
the discontent of the people and he was 
constantly occupied in stifling the one and 
preventing the other. He always observed 
the greatest reserve with his generals, kept 
them always at a great distance [arm's 
length], hardly spoke to them, and when he 
did only on indifferent matters. They were 
never made acquainted with his orders ex- 
cept at the moment when they had to set 
out to execute them. If they distinguished 
themselves he simply said they had done 
their duty. Only once in a while he made 
honorable mention of them in his bulletins. 
Were they unfortunate the whole fault was 
theirs, and neither the inferiority of the 
troops assigned to their command nor the 
unfavorable conditions in which this in- 
feriority placed them were taken into ac- 
count. Thus, with the exception of two 
or three, whom he had known in his youth 
and who had kept up a certain liberty with 
him, the others approached him in tremb- 
ling and they could not say that they ever 
enjoyed a moment's liberty. Even Duroc, 
that nullity, that slave to Buonaparte's 



36 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



will, sometimes felt severe constriction of 
the straight jacket and rebelled without 
daring to grimace in the presence of his 
despot. See Bourrienne iii, 342. [Consult 
and compare pages 246, 248, 249, 250, in 
the original French.] 

When the treaty of Ruel was signed by 
Twelve Generals, Massena was selected to 
get the signature of Buonaparte, to whom 
as his share Paris, and its dependent dis- 
tricts, was assigned. Massena refused, al- 
leging that he would only leave the 



Tuilleries, Buonaparte's headquarters, to "be 
shot by the latter' s guards. Buonaparte 
thereupon remarked, " Massena knew me, 
well '•' — admitting he would have shot him. 
Ivannes, 252. He would have shot St. Cyr 
for a trifle; Loison for even less. Lannes 
alone retained his frankness and independ- 
ence; Berthier was simply a favorite slave ; 
Duroc was a nullity, but devoted and 
secret. Buonaparte was surrounded by 
Seids, dumb and blind, instruments of his 
criminal resolves. 



V. 



TN continuation of Chaptal's Souvenirs, 
- , he says: "If Buonaparte could have 

tit/VvviXo -S€H4;-i4»eH-tS' to his ambition he would be 
still [1817] upon the throne of France 
loaded with the benedictions of the people, 
but Providence had decided otherwise. The 
modest title of First Consul appeared be- 
neath his pretensions ; he wished to estab- 
lish a dynasty and found an empire. Then 
he re-cast our institutions and arrogated to 
himself prerogatives which, until that time, 
had belonged to the great legislative bodies 
[organized corps of functionaries] ; he iso- 
lated himself from the men who until then 
had lived with him on a comparative species 
of familiarity. He established a severe eti- 
quette at his court. He created for his 
courtiers a luxury of costumes which had 
never been seen at the most sumptuous 
courts. These innovations brought about 
a fatal change in public opinion. The men 
who attached themselves to him lost almost 
in equal degree all interest in their coun- 
try, and from this moment he had only 
flatterers about him. His will became the 
supreme law. His courtiers proclaimed 
that his decrees were oracles. The least 
criticism was punished as a revolt. The 
sensible portion of the nation became silent 
and confined themselves to groans [lamen- 
tations]. The legislative bodies, who were 
only consulted to furnish an appearance of 



legality to the acts of his will, were lowered 
in public opinion ; tlius the most FRIGHTFUL 
DESPOTISM which was ever laid zvith crush- 
ing weight upon men^ assumed form and 
became consolidated. No sooner able to 
curb [subject] the nation to his will than 
his ambition no longer recognized any limi- 
tations. In his delirium he pretended [cal- 
culated] to become the master of the world 
and in the space of six or seven years ; he 
succeeded in effect in subjecting to his 
domination almost all Europe ; and he 
would have executed this gigantic plan if 
public opinion in France, which had 
turned against him, had not reunited with 
the foreign coalition to thrust him from 
power. 

" Napoleon [at last?] recognized his posi- 
tion, but acquired the conviction too late. 
He thought that France was inexhaustible 
in its affection for him ; he formed an erro- 
neous judgment at once, both of his own 
nation and of foreigners ; he believed that 
the first would not abandon him and that 
his enemies would not dare to penetrate 
the interior of the kingdom, and his eyes 
were only opened to the truth when there 
was no longer any remedy. During the 
campaign of 1814 he had the misery to per- 
ceive that the French appealed to the dom- 
ination of foreigners. 

" Persons who had been brought but little 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



37 



in contact with Napoleon, and only saw 
him for a short time, could only form a 
very unfavorable judgment of him. His 
first contact was chilling and his remarks 
insignificant, rude. He was destitute of 
the agreeable address which results from 
intercourse with the world or a careful edu- 
cation. * * Often, indeed, he was un- 
mannerly and gross [towards women], for 
instance, ' Ah ! good gracious ! people 
have told me that you are pretty p * * 
In general. Napoleon had the manners of a 
badly brought-up young lieutenant, and in 
coming in contact with him for the first 
time, nothing in him revealed either intel- 
lectuality or the slightest good manners. I 
have seen him at his receptions come out of 
his cabinet to accost women without inter- 
rupting his tune, and return to it humming 
an Italian air. 

"Napoleon one day expressed some regret 
that the poet Lemercier had not accompa- 
nied him to Egypt. The poet observed that 
he ' was not happy where human rights 
were not recognized [or rather, were disre- 
garded].' 'Well,' replied Buonaparte, 
' you would have seen a country where the 
sovereign set no value on the lives of his 
subjects, and where the subject set no value 
on his own life. [Compare N. W. Senior's 
'Conversations and Journals on Egypt,' 
ii, 35.] Buonaparte would not permit any 
one to argue against him. The least inad- 
vertence, the slightest inattention, aroused 
him into a perfect fury. How could any 
one feel at his ease in the neighborhood of 
Napoleon, when everyone was, as it were, 
upon thorns, not knowing when his temper 
would explode into acts of violence? In 
fact his Court Avas an absolute galley, in 
which each one [like a slave on board a 
Barbary corsair] rowed according to strict 
regulation [under momentary danger of the 
lash]. 

" No one was at his ease in the society of 
Napoleon except himself He never al- 



lowed himself to be put out in anything and 
he held everyone about him strictly within 
the bounds of etiquette and the most severe 
restraint. The sovereign contempt which 
he had for men inspired this conduct. Those 
who have studied Napoleon closely per- 
ceived that during the fifteen years of his 
reign the greatest changes took place in 
him, both physical and moral. Nothing 
could equal his activity during the four 
years of his Consulate. At that epoch he 
sought to instruct himself in everything re- 
lating to the administration, and gathered 
in council every day the very ablest men, 
and with them discussed all the questions 
which came up. He wore out his counsel- 
lors, while he himself was untiring. When, 
however, he had acquainted himself with 
matters and had formed an opinion for him- 
self upon everything, as I have already 
said, he no longer listened to anyone. 
Thenceforward his very ministers were 
simply holders or bearers of portfolios, 
which they handed back to Marets [Duke 
of Bassano, Minister-Secretary of State], 
who made them affix their signatures. 

"It was at that epoch that Buonaparte 
proclaimed himself Emperor. At 40 years 
of age he began to be corpulent. He no 
longer had the same confidence in his 
powers. He had degenerated [or was a de- 
generate]. 

" It was particularly after his return from 
Moscow that those who were in closest 
contact with him remarked the very great 
change which had taken place in the phy- 
sical and moral constitution of Napoleon. 
This campaign, (without?) lessening his mil- 
itary glory [it completely dissipated his illu- 
sive reputation for military superiority], 
had shown his want of foresight, and 
through him caused the destruction of the 
finest army which ever existed ; forcing 
him to renounce the most gigantic plan 
which his ambition had conceived. On 
the other'hand, the extreme cold to which 



38 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



he had been exposed had affected his own 
morale^ and I confess that after this sad 
period I neither could discover in him the 
same [consequential or coherent] train of 
ideas nor the same force of character. 
Flashes [transports] of imagination were 
perceptible, but always incoherent. Neither 
the same appetite nor the same aptitude for 
work were perceptible, and I have often 
remarked that of the one hundred fibres of 
which his brain might be composed there 
were no longer fifty in healthy condition." 

" From this time forward horseback exer- 
cise became insupportable to him. Somno- 
lence, which until then he had mastered, 
now mastered him in turn. The table, 
which had appeared a matter of indiflFerence 
to him, now commenced to present attrac- 
tions." To prove that acute gastritis, not 
cancer of the stomach, caused his death, 
reflect upon the following statement :* 

This perfectly justifies and explains Dr. 
Hereau's opinion that Buonaparte died of 
chronic gastritis not cancer of the stomach. 
See March number of the COLLEGE Stu- 
dent, page io8. 

" He alone did not perceive these changes. 
He wished to repair his fortune without the 
same means that he had possessed to estab- 
lish it, and, far from attributing this change 
to himself, he charged all his own faults to 



*NoTE.— " Napoleon defied the laws of nature, in so 
far as he devoured his food like an animal and treated 
his organs of digestion as though they were not sub- 
ject to natural laws. In consequence he became sub- 
ject to violent pains in the stomach, for which physi- 
cians have various obscure names. In plain English, 
he had been forcing his stomach to do more work 
than any human stomach could do, and that stomach 
had finally got out of repair. The pains arising from 
this complaint are most acute, and Napoleon had sev- 
eral times before, notably in the Russian campaign, 
been rendered helpless by the result of his gluttony, 
coupled with a necessarily irregular mode of life." 

Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. 55;, April, 
1896, page 764, second column, Poultney Bigelow's 
" The Prussians Win Back what the Austrians Had 
Lost. ' ' 



the treason or to the incapacity of his gen- 
erals. General Becker, who was invested 
with the duty of accompanying Napoleon 
to Rochefort, where he delivered himself 
up to the English, informed me that he ac- 
cused his generals of all his reverses through- 
out his last campaign. 

' ' Since the smallest details often contribute 
to better reveal the character of men than 
great events, I will now relate some indi- 
cations of the domestic life of Napoleon 
from which his character can be more cor- 
rectly judged. By habit and through char- 
acter Napoleon was a destroyer [an Abad- 
don]. * * * If a delicate piece of 
sculpture was presented to him it rarely left 
his hands without being mutilated. * * * 
When I observed that the artist would die 
with mortification if he saw his work thus 
ruined, he coldly replied : ' A little paste 
can repair all the damage.' If he caressed 
a child, he pinched it so as to make it cry. 
At Malmaison [in the very spirit of Domi- 
tian] he had a fowling-piece in his pri- 
vate room with which he constantly fired 
through the window at the rare birds which 
Josephine kept in the ponds of the park. 
This malevolent genius of destruction pos- 
sessed him to such a degree that he 
never entered the hot-houses of Malmaison 
without mutilating or rooting up some of 
the precious plants which were cultivated 
there. Will it be believed that with this 
mania for destruction, he established the 
greatest order in his expenses [even to 
meanness], t * * * He was endowed 



tAs a farther exemplification of this genius of de- 
struction and disregard of the feeling of others, a goat 
and two kids belonging to the Countess Bertraod, 
having strayed into his garden at St. Helena and 
made free with his flowers, Buonaparte took his fowl- 
ing piece and shot one of the animals, 20th of January 
1820. If anyone deserved consideration it was this 
lady, whose horror of the anticipated life at St. 
Helena nearly led to her commission of suicide on 
board the Bellerophon. Fearing her other two pets 
might be shot likewise, she gave them away. This 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



39 



with an extraordinary memory, especially 
for figures and names * * * As a rule 
he was alwaj'S simply dressed * * * 
but on grand occasions he displayed great 
luxury, but such costumes sat ill upon 
him : they seemed to embarrass him * * * 
It was generally believed that Napoleon 
was prodigal. It was never at his own ex- 
pense. * * * No sovereign gave more 
than he, but no one ever [when he did 
give] caused more dissatisfaction. To me 
the reason appeared perfectly plain. First 
— his liberalities were bestowed by caprice 
and the gift was never founded on service 
or the necessities of the recipient. Some 
were overlooked, others [who deserved] 
got nothing. Secondly, Napoleon never 
accorded a favor nor made a gift in a way 
to inspire gratitude. He always did it as 
if he was bestowing alms, never as a reward 
for service. He humiliated rather than en- 
couraged. * * * Napoleon never ex- 
perienced a generous sentiment. It was 
this which rendered association with him 
so soulless. The result of this, he had not 
a single friend. 

"According to sentimental Chauvinists or 
Napoleonic idolaters, Duroc was Buona- 
parte' syr/i?^^. Duroc was simply a willing 
slave, a tool, a blind, dumb, deaf instru- 
ment. [Marshal Castellane (i, 230) confirms 
this opinion.] According to British Judge- 
Advocate Larpent's Diary or Journal : On 
that day, i6th of June, 1813, General Jeron 
arrived, the general of theGallician-Spanish 
army acting with us, and he dined there. 
* * * Jeron is a man about thirty-six, I 



shooting chickens and kids seemed to afford amuse- 
ment to him, Buonaparte, and he had young goats 
bought for him to shoot. On the gth of February, 
1829, he shot two fowls belonging to his Valet 
Novarraz. This so offended his faithful follower, the 
valet wished to leave his service, but was only dis- 
suaded from doining so by Governor Lowe. He after- 
wards desired larger game and shot a bullock. 
Forsyth's "History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St. 
Helena," Vol. Ill, Pages 206-7, etc 



should think, and looks very much like a 
gentleman and a man of talent ; he is very 
well spoken of, and considered as one of 
the best of the Spanish leaders. * * * 
Talking during the dinner of the late ac- 
counts from Buonaparte, and of the senii- 
meiilal story about DuROC — [whose dying 
bed Buonaparte left with the assurance of 
' a meeting hereafter in a better world ' 
{u7z monde meilleiir). (Marbot iii, 251-2). 
It would appear that the two greatest favor- 
ites of Buonaparte, Lannes (1809) and 
Duroc (1813) were both mortally wounded 
by cannon shots, on the same day of the 
same month, 22d of May] — which Lord 
Wellington was laughing at, General Jeron 
said : ' If there mas such a place as Hell^ 
he thought Buonaparte quite right^ and 
that he and Duroc would most certainly 
meet again there.'' [Duroc, with some re- 
deeming qualities, was simply a cold- 
blooded in.strument of Buonaparte's will, 
as much so as cold steel in the hands of a 
practical ruffian]. [Chaptal styles him 
^ un homme nuP (a perfect nullity) and 
other honest writers corroborate this esti- 
mate on similar words more or less forcible. 
He seems to have been an amiable man 
and a peace, rather than a mischief-maker]. " 
Buonaparte looked upon men as vile, 
small change or as instruments to serve for 
the satisfaction of his caprices and ambi- 
tion. A Russian envoy. Prince Kourakin, 
once spoke of the recruiting resources of 
his empire. Yes, I agree said he, but can 
your master expend as I can 25,000 lives a 
month. [This was exactly the counterpart 
of his remark to Metternich at Dresden in 
1813. That he * * * * on the lives 
of 200,000 men. * * * Many of the acts 
of his life must be referred to this insensi- 
bility. He often said to me that to ad- 
minister well the heart must be transferred 
to the head. Napoleon had no attachment 
for his family. It was through vanity that 
he had elevated them, but not from any 



40 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



sentiments of their individual njerits, nor 
from affection for either one. He only ap- 
peared sensible to the debaucheries of his 
sisters when they debased themselves in 
their love affairs. He often spoke with 
contempt of his brothers. * * * His 
brothers had all his obstinacy without hav- 
ing the same [stronger] qualities nor the 
same [startling] defects. Joseph seemed to 
have more good nature and less ambition, 
entirely possessed with desires for women * 



-*" Colonel Campbell, who is just come into the 
town [Vittora, 1813,] on business, says that the 
French have committed great ravages on their route 
from this place, destroying property, committing 
every excess. A girl at Lord Wellington's quarters at 
Salvatierra accuses even King Joseph of an attempt at 
violence ; but I do not believe it. Some very strange 
things were found in the baggage." "The Private 
Journal of Judge- Advocate Larpent." Edited by Sir 
George I^arpent, Bart : Third Edition, London, 1854. 
Page 165. 

In the preceding paragraph a hint is given of the 
peculiar tendency of King Pepe, or Joseph Buona- 
parte, to amuse himself with the other sex, from 
which none of the Buonapartes were free in a more or 
less genteel or brutal manner. 

The following extract from the " Memoires " of the 
Chancellor Pasquier demonstrates that his tastes were 
not restricted and that he sometimes flew at the low- 
est and sometimes at the highest game. 

In 1S14, at the time of the abdication of the Empe- 
ror, the Duke of Rovigo, who was at the head of the 
police, confided to the Chancellor a locked portfolio 
containing his correspondence with the Emperor 
(iii, 237-8). Circumstances occu:red, which influ- 
enced Pasquier as a matter of duty to open the port- 
folio to judge for himself from the contents if the 
Duke of Rovigo had told the truth in regard to its 
importance, and whether or not it held matters other 
than the correspondence indicated. In making this 
verification, which proved his sincerity, my examina- 
tion was naturally directed to the documents which 
were not bonud up in bundles, and these were the 
last of ths correspondence such as had been written 
by Napoleon after his departure from Rheims [to 
make that desperate movement in the rear the of 
Allies which led to the fall of Paris], What was my 
astonishment to find that they dwelt for the most part 
upon the suspicions which he had conceived in regard 
to the Empress Marie Louise, or rather to his brother 
Joseph, whom he accused of having made the most 
odious advances towards her. The Duke of Rovigo 
was severely reprimanded for not having given him 



and love of an idle life. * * * Jerome had 
natural ability, but it would be difficult to 
find a young man more arrogant or worse 
brought up; more ignorant or more ambi- 
tious. When Buonaparte was placed at the 
head of the government, Jerome was 
scarcely twelve years old, and since that 
time he was nourished upon adulation and 
debauchery, and he was the most servile of 
all the courtiers of Napoleon, who repaid 
this docility with all the favors it was in 



any information on this subject, and he enjoined 
upon him in the future to exercise the most exact 
supervision of what occurred in the interior of the 
palace. For a long time I believed that this accusa- 
tion of Napoleon was occasioned through the disor- 
ders of a mind which vexations without number dis- 
posed to conceive all sorts of suspicions, but I have 
since learned from M. de ^aint-Aignan, who, consid- 
ering his extremely intimate relations with the Duch- 
ess of Monte Bello, was necessarily informed upon 
this subject, that the suspicion was only too well 
founded and that the Empress at this epoch was only 
too much importuned and had altogether too much to 
complain of the overtures of her brother-in-law." 
Was the Empress innocent ? 

They were a jolly lot, these Buonapartes. They 
had about as much idea of principle as a monkey has 
of logarythms. At Orleans they tried to carry off the 
Empress as a sort of hostage to aid them in preserv- 
ing their plunder, and she had to cry aloud for assist- 
ance to save her from their attempts at force. Jerome 
endeavored to get possession by violence of the 
wagons loaded with treasure, and the whole of this 
set were just as anxious at the last to secure what 
spoils they could as they had always hitherto made 
their whole lives subservient to their gain and de- 
baucheries. This charge against Jerome appeared in 
one of the narratives of the flight of the Empress 
Marie Louise, in April, 1S14 ; that while at Blois. 
Jerome Buonaparte conceived a plan to get possession 
of one of the treasury wagons loaded with coin, and 
at once sent a pistol bullet through the head of the 
sentinel standing guard over it. Tde report, how- 
ever, roused the guard and the treasure was saved, 
and Jerome's attempt was known to so few — although 
alleged in the Royalist newspapers — that it is only re- 
corded in one work examined. 

As previously stated, the Buonapartes came into 
France steeped to the lips in indigence, and they went 
out of it sufficiently wealthy, one and all, to maintain 
positions to which they had no claim through' birth, 
service or character. 

The author of all their acquisitions, so tolerant of 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



41 



[Marshal Castellane confirms Chaptal i, 369] 
his power to bestow. * * * We have 
already observed Napoleon was entirely 



without instruction. The Greek and Latin 
authors were almost unknown to him. He 
believed neither in virtue nor in probity 



their villainies, villain as he was himself, suffered the 
most of all the criminals. Not but that his sufferings 
were attributable entirely to himself, and if the Buon- 
apartes ever enjoyed any success it was entirely due 
to his crimes. 

There were terrible expiations. The half or one- 
third Dutch-Napoleon III (N.W. Senior's "Conversa- 
tions with Distinguished Persons during the Second 
Empire," ii, 104,) certainly had full swing for eigh- 
teen years, but his fall and physical sufferings almost 
atoned for his terrible sins. As for his bigot wife 
and his innocent son their after-life was torture, and 
the end an expiation regularly consonant with 
Greek tragedy. The worst, Jerome Buonaparte, 
died in peace and plenty, and his son, the brightest 
in intellect of them all, suffered no punisnment at all. 
If there is no other world and there is no retri- 
bution beyond the grave, they justified the Ivucretian 
maxim: "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we 
die." His noble wife, the Sardinian Princess Chlo- 
tilde, sacrificed to diplomatic exigencies, drove out of 
Paris in the face of day like a royal lady, the scion of 
a race of kings and hei oes The Empress Eugenie 
stole out abandoned by all her sycophants aud the 
servile herd who had fed upon her ill-directed boun- 
ties — saved by an American dentist. With all the 
horror possible to conceive, Napoleone di Buonaparte 
was punished almost as exquisitely as his worst enemy 
could desire. With a wife — to whom he was more 
attentive than to any other human being — " the dire- 
ful spring" of his, misfortunes, in the embraces of a 
one-eyed Austrian General, the husband of a divorced 
woman and the paramour of an Empress not di- 
vorced, a wife who would not even receive the physi- 
cian who brought her the heart of a husband, who 
died clinging to her memory ; with a son born to the 
title of Imperial Rome, a prisoner of State, although 
a Duke \>y title ; with a cancer or acute maladies eat- 
ing at his vitals and a cancer gnawing at his pride, 
" cribbed, cabined and confined," it was not a pleas, 
ant life to live or a pleasant death to die. " You are 
not a gentleman," said Sir Hudson Lowe to Buona- 
parte. He was perfectly correct in his judgment. 
" It is a great pity that so great a man should have 
been so badly brought up," quoth the arch-courtier 
Talleyrand. Exact truth ! If Buonaparte had within 
him the smallest sentiments of gentlemanly feeling 
his captivity at St. Helena would have been assuaged 
by the faculty of adapting himself to altered circum- 
stances and to accepting the situation with grace and 
dignity, if not with satisfaction. His repudiated wife, 
good or bad, to whom he owed his elevation, died 
surrounded with respect and bedewed with honest 



tears ; his Imperial consort falling lower and lower 
with the reprobation of every honest soul. 

Marie Louise, Successor of the Empress 
Josephine — It is most marvellous how the crimes, 
cruelties, sensualities, dishonesties, frauds, false- 
hoods, vile lying of Napoleon Bonaparte are condoned, 
not only by French writers, from whom, as a rule — 
with grand exceptions — little or nothing of reproof 
could ht expected, but by English and Americans, 
who — until nearly transformed by Latin immigrated 
[imported] ideas — were honest, humane, and home- 
respecting in their sentiments. Above all, how Marie 
Louise, who succeeded to the bed of Josephine, has 
escaped with so slight animadversion is even more 
surprising, except that the French can not bring 
themselves to admit that the Austrian archduchess 
could forget that she had been the wife of that arch- 
devil, the very god of the French, the "tulelary- 
deity," as Cardinal de Rohan said Napoleon was to 
him, and was rewarded by a lien of 12,000 francs on 
the theatre-fund - and that ought to have been so 
proud of being his illegal wife as to be inaccessible to 
feeling for any other human being. However, some 
Frenchmen have told a portion of the truth, that she 
was no better than the circle into which she was ad- 
mitted by her marriage, which according to the Papal 
Church, was no marriage. In looking over *' The 
Liberation of Italy, 1S15-1870," by the Countess 
Evelyn Martinego Cesaresco, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 
iSgs, at pages 88 and 89 the following paragraph was 
encountered : 

"The bargain with Tuscany had been struck only 
eight days when Marie Louise died, unlamented, 
since the latter years of her reign formed a sad con- 
trast to the earlier. Marie Louise had not a bad dis- 
position, but she always let her husband of the hour 
govern as he chose ; of the four or five of these hus- 
bands, the last two, and particularly the hated Count 
de Bombelles, undid all the good done by their more 
humane predecessors. The Parmese petitioned their 
new duke to send the man away, and to grant them 
some measure of freedom The answer he gave was 
the confirmation of Bombelles in all his honors, and 
the conclusion of a treaty with Austria, securing the 
assistance of her arms. A military force had been 
sent to Parma to escort the body of the late duchess 
to Vienna ; but, on the principle that the living are of 
more consequence than the dead, it remained there to 
protect the new duke from his subjects. Marie Louise 
and her lovers, Cliarles Ludovico and his joclzey-min- 
isier, are instructive illustrations of the scandalous 
point things had reached in the small states of Italy." 



42 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



and often styled these two words abstrac- 
tions. It is that which rendered him so 
suspicious and immoral, and politics were 
simply craft and deceit. Sometimes, when 
compelled to yield to circumstances, he 
signed treaties as an adjournment of his ul- 
terior plans. * * * He did not speak 
any one [French] language well, [nor write 
it — it was written for him]. His maternal 
language was Corsican, which is an Italian 
jargon, and when he undertook to express 
himself in French it was at once percepti- 
ble that he was a foreigner [like Suworrow, 
a similar character, like himself a savage, 
but with the virtues oi a barbarian]. ["In 
Vienna no one could fathom Suworrow, 
' that unexampled mixture of genius and 
madness, of penetration and grimace.' " In 
many respects the counterpart of Buona- 
parte, what a pity they did not meet (Vehse 
ii, 345, (i)]. He preferred rather an auda- 
cious lie than the truth born of hesitation. 
He affected agreat predilictionfor Regnauld 
de Saint Angely, who boldly answered every 
question and would not have been embarrass- 
ed for a reply if Buonaparte had asked him 
howmanymillions of flies were to be found in 
Europe in August. * * * Napoleon used up 
without compassion all the men who served 
him, whether civil or military, and had no 
respect for age, for infirmities, nor for fa- 
tigue, and never accorded sufficient time to 
prepare the labors he demanded. Nights 
would be expended in his service, and it 
was rare that he was ever satisfied, and 
more rare that he exhibited the air of tak- 
ing into account the fatigue undergone in 
his service." 

" One day in council, he was aggravating 
Champagny, who had not been able to fur- 
nish some information which required long 
and patient examination of the archives. 
The Minister observed that the Archivist 
was ill. Thereupon Buonaparte replied 
roughl}^, turning towards Montavliet, who 
suffered terribly from the gout, 'Well,' 



with a dirty oath, ' when clerks are sick 
they should be sent to the hospital and 
others substituted.' He who was so impe- 
rious and so exacting in regard to his sub- 
ordinates, nevertheless set not the slightest 
value upon their time. He would fix an 
hour and then make his ministers and coun- 
cillors wait two or three hours in his ante- 
chambers. [It was this total disregard of 
the feelings that often overcame the obse- 
quious servility of even such a devoted 
slave as Duroc. On one occasion it is re- 
lated that after having been at work with 
Napoleon almost to the exhaustion of his 
patience, he had thrown off his trappings 
to take a little rest when his despot sent for 
him again. Applying to Napoleon a very 
blackguard epithet, he resumed his official 
dress, with a remark equivalent to saying 
that so it was, that Napoleon would never 
give him a moment for relaxation. Here 
comes in very appositely the comment of 
General Jeron on remark made by Napoleon 
beside Duroc's dying bed, making an ap- 
pointment in a better world. 

* * * " In all circumstances he devel- 
oped a great talent, but above all a great 
subtility. He was never at a loss for mo- 
tives to endeavor to legitimate measures 
most arbitrary and often the most atrocious. 
It was in these effusions of confidence that 
it was possible to penetrate the crafty char- 
acter of Napoleon, the principles of his 
politics and his opinion of men." 

" Napoleon possessed inflexibility of will 
which comprised the exaction of the imme- 
diate execution of his orders without exam- 
ination, without resistance and without ob- 
servation, and he exercised the same des- 
potism in the army as in the interior admin- 
istration. * He would not put up with the 



* " I had — was the false and cruel charge made by 
Buonaparte ?— in the hands of the banker Torlonia, at 
Rome, bills of exchange to the amount of two or 
three hundred thousand liveres, in bills of exchange, 
the product of my revenues of the Island of Elba 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



43 



refusal of any employment by any individ- 
ual whom he named without ever consult- 
ing him ; a refusal always entailed disagree 
upon the innocent victim. No one ever 
became aware of any nomination of himself 
to office. His most intimate friends only 
became cognizant of it through the public 
papers and the ministers. The ministers 
themselves had very little to do with ap- 
pointments. Buonaparte troubled himself 
very little if the employees had the neces- 
sary abilities ; he appointed them withotit 
knowing them. [Marshal Castellane con- 
firms this.] 

"To furnish an idea of the morals of 
France, Chaptal relates the following inci- 
dent. The citizens of Namur appeared 
before Buonaparte to complain of their 
bishop. They accused him of insulting 
women in the church, simply because their 
dress did not please him ; they charged that 
during a procession at the entrance of the 
church, when the crowd retarded his ad- 



since 1815. The Sieur de la PejTusse, although no 
longer my treasurer, and not invested with any such 
office, possessed himself of this sum He shall be 
compelled to refund it." 

" Baron Peyrusse had been treasurer to Napoleon at 
Elba. In 1829 General Bertrand, with the other exec- 
utors of this will, certified that Peyrusse had properly 
accounted for the funds in question, and that this 
paragraph had been dictated in ignorance of the facts 
of the case. " See Me7ieval, Vol. II, p. 95. Scribner's 
Bourrienne, Vol. IV, page 433. 

Consult curious " Lettres Inedities du Baron 
Guillaume Peyrusse, Ecrites a son frere Andre pend- 
ant les Campagnes de I'Empire de 1809 a 1814, 
PuDliees d'apres les manuscrits originaux, avec une 
Notice sur Peyrusse par Leon G. Pelissier," Paris, x«94. 

Baron Peyrusse, to whom Buonaparte is so shame- 
fully unjust in his Third Codicil 'i2, has presented 
some remarkable pen-pictures of his master. He 
writes (XXI) that Napoleon during the campaign was 
to the last like himself, hard and impassable, treating 
those around him with the greatest contempt amid 
his reverses ; then all at once foundering through 
the catastrophe of the abdication. When the Empire 
is lost nothing remains to lose, said Napoleon, and in 
fact he did not take any measures to gather up the re- 
mains of his treasure and tried to poison himself. 
Then two sentiments manifested themselves in this 



vance, he ordered the cross-bearer to beat 

those , using a blackguard expression, 

with his cross. They added that he lived 
publicly with a girl whom he passed off as 
his niece. Buonaparte talked the matter 
over in the evening with the bishop, who 
replied that he had served in the army of 
the Rhine and that he could not give up 
his old habits." 

" As Buonaparte was naturally suspicious 
and mistrusting, he covered France with 
spies, and he believed their reports with the 
same perfect faith that an old priest believes 
in the gospel. Every day brought in new 
denunciations and every day revealed pre- 
tended conspiracies, and they saw him 
withdraw his confidence from one set and 
throw the others into dungeons without any 
one being able to discover the motive. The 
list of officials would serve as the roster of 
an army. Public administrators were de- 
prived of their functions, peaceable citizens 
incarcerated, etc., upon police reports. It 



overthrown soul, the desire for money, he wished to 
assure himself of such resources and tried to get pos- 
session of the crown treasure, and the frenzy of hold- 
ing on to life — hence his cowardice, like that of 
Mazarin, little dissembled throughout the journey 
through Provence. The editor of these letters remarks 
this total abandonment of dignity in the presence of 
danger and to better assure personal preservation it is a 
trait characteristic of the Italian spirit of the Renais- 
sance, which presents itself in the corroboration of the 
celebrated theory of M. Paine. This allusion to Car- 
dinal Mazarin may not be understood. Never was a 
greater bully than this Italian in prosperity, never a 
greater poltroon in moments of personal peril." 

Perhaps there is no better proof of the littleness of ■ 
Buonaparte than his bitter hatred towards Count 
Waldbourg-Truchsess, the Prussian commissioner who 
saw him off to Elba, because it was that gentleman 
who in detail represented Napoleon's unaccountable 
cowardice during the journey down along the Rhone. 

Perhaps it is not generally known that when the 
Austrian Commissioner, Baron Kohler, took his leave 
of Buonaparte the latter embraced him, weeping with 
every demonstration of warm attachment. When, 
afterwards, Kohler was asked of what he was think- 
ing thus enfolded in Buonaparte's arms, he replied : 
"Judas Iscariot." 



44 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



was a perfect reign of terror [without the 
guillotine]. To all the other police was 
added that of the aids-de-camp and gener- 
als who comprised the Guard of Napoleon. 
This police was the most dangerous of all 
for the persons in the court and the 
principal officers in the administration, be- 
cause it was confided to men devoted to 
him, who misrepresented everything and 
envenomed everything, and presented as 
criminals all those who were not cowardly 
adorers of their idol. All this police scaf- 
folding did not yet even satisfy Napoleon 
and some women and courtiers considered 
most respectable in society were his paid 
agents, and arrests were made and degra- 
dations effected without any possibility of 
discovering the cause. [It was said that 
evenjosephine wasin the pay of Foucheas a 
spy on her husband]. Thus, in the last 
years of his reign, the degradations became 
a title of glory to the sufferers, and nothing 
announces more clearly how little esteem 
was felt for the sovereign. Napoleon was 
very fond of gossipings. Many of his inti- 
mate agents kept him posted as regards the 
scandalous anecdotes in Paris and the Court, 
and it was from these impure sources that 
he derived the prejudices which influenced 
him against certain persons. [This must 
remind a reader posted in history, of the 
brutal littleness of Caligula, and there are 
stories of Buonaparte, divested of the 
cruelty and bloodshed, of the Roman Em- 
peror, which would be by no means un- 
worthy as regards the total want of delicacy 
of that successor to Tiberius ; which by the 
way goes far to explain why Buonaparte 
considered Tacitus was the worst historian 
of antiquity, because, perhaps, he had 
formed this opinion after the picture which 
this author had made of Tiberius]." 

Chancellor Pasquier says, iii, 162: "There 
is no doubt but that the whole time that 
Buonaparte was at Elba he was engaged in 
perfecting his plans to return to France, 



but that his decrees, which were drawn up 
at Paris, were purposely antedated in order 
to give the impression that the government 
was in his hands as soon as he stood upon 
the soil of France. Others again, equally 
capable of judging, feel assured that while 
lie was supposed to be writing his memoirs 
at Elba he was preparing his public papers 
to be issued after his seizure again of the 
reins. However, he was such a hypocrite 
and such a liar that the truth can never be 
ascertained." [The famous assertion of 
his regulating the Theatre Francaise from 
Moscow is not true. The French Archives 
reveal that Napoleon was in Poland when 
he received the decree ready to be signed. 
On the margin he wrote: "The decree 
should be forwarded from that town," i. e. 
Moscow. What a charlatan ! confirming 
Castellane's record of his^trickery at Mos- 
cow i, 161.] 

" There seemed to be two minds in Buona- 
parte during 'the Hundred Days' — one clear, 
the other clouded. In many matters of the 
greatest importance he was the victim of 
self-delusion. An adept in deceit, he ended 
in deceiving himself. Nevertheless, he had 
moments of perfect recognition of the truth. 
When M. Mollien felicitated him upon the 
brilliant reception which he had met with 
all the way from Cannes to Paris, he re- 
plied : ' No illusions, my dear sir, they 
have allowed me to come back just as they 
let the others go away.' Fouche was a 
perfect prophet. Long before the event he 
said that Napoleon would come back and 
that his adventure would not last four 
months. Caulincoiu't, perhaps his truest 
friend, declared that the Emperor's enter- 
prise was madness. Our most determined 
generals were themselves frightened at the 
outlook. Buonaparte himself when he sat 
down to reflect recognized that his throne 
was set upon a treacherous foundation built 
over quicksands. And yet this mightiest 
of mighty intellects, as his admirers unite 



Napoleonk di Buonaparte. 



45 



in chorus to declare, had learned nothing 
from the hardest experience and the illumi- 
nation of events. ' This man has received 
correct ideas in no direction, and returns 
just as much of a despot as when he was 
driven out, just as desirous of making con- 
quests, just the same madman in fact as 
when he was driven out.' The Rock of 
Bronze was never of that metal except when 
fortune lured and bore him in her arms. In 
adversity he was rather lead than iron, im- 
pressionable, ductile, often led by the nose 
by far inferior minds. Never has a man in 
such a public position been less understood, 
except by a very few analytical critics. He 
was great only in crimes against his fellow- 
men, and when a prisoner he displayed less 
dignity than the Zulu Cetewayo. Welling- 
ton had a very penetrating judgment when 
he said that Buonaparte was more afraid of 
his Marshals than his Marshals were of 
him. They often set him at defiance, and 
when in future years the glamor is dispelled 
it will found that throughout history there 
have been far greater organizers, adminis- 
trators, than Buonaparte, and withal unsel- 
fish, patriotic and honest without one tithe 
of his despotic power. Everything about 
him was deception. * The son of one of his 
most prominent servitors, de L,esseps, of 
Suez Canal fame, said to Senior (i, 128) : 
' As a man of creative and administrative 
genius, I put him [Mahomet Ali] very high ; 
indeed I am not sure that I do not put him 
higher than Napoleon himself, if we take 
into account their comparative advan- 
tages.'" 

Charras, famous as a military critic and 
for his history of the Waterloo Campaign 
and opening phases of the campaign of 
1813, considered that the "merits of the 
first part of the campaign of 1814, from the 
loth of February to the i8th of February, 



*I, 189, Napoleon's sarcophagus of sandstone, as 
ugly as the rest of the tomb, which the Emperor Na- 
poleon III believes to be porphyry. (Senior ii, 21 ; 
ii, 165). 



were at least equalled by the blunders and 
irresolutions of the second part from the 
27th of February to the 31st of March." 

The merits of the first part were due to 
Buonaparte's one-man authority, which 
gave him the power of recklessly squander- 
ing all that gave force to his military ma- 
chine and the demerits of the second part 
that his one-man authority had decreased 
in an even greater degree than the veteran 
leaven which had stimulated the ruthless 
conscriptions of 1813-1814. He himself 
said years before, "the bow was over- 
strained" and the bow, whose defects he 
already recognized, "turned aside," as the 
Scripture says, "like a deceitful bow," 
which simply meant that when pulled to 
the ear the string slipped off, because the 
bow itself had lost its elasticity or tension 
and, bent too far, allowing the string to slip 
out of the notches at either end. 

The more the careful historical student 
examines Thiers, and the greater attention 
he devotes to the language used by that 
writer, extraordinary in his brilliancy and 
audacity, the more clear it will become that 
there are expressions and sentences and par- 
agraphs and judgments, that absolutely 
neutralize all the praise that he lavishes 
upon that bad man before whose idol, in 
order to flatter his own vain countrymen, 
he, as a rule, burns so much mendacious 
incense. Prof. Jules Barni, in his "Napo- 
leon et Son Historien M. Thiers," Geneva, 
(Switzerland,) 1865, demonstrates magnifi- 
cently the perversions of "mendacious 
Thiers." 
In Thiers' Book LII, referring to February, 
1814, appears the following sentence, which 
marks (XVII, 144): "Undoubtedly the 
conquests that Napoleon had made from the 
Rhine to Vistula, from the Alps to the 
Straits of Messina, froni the Pyrenees to 
Gibraltar, were not worth the blood they 
had cost, and, indeed, would not have been 
worth the life of one man." 

Again, speaking of Buonaparte's letter to 



46 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



Savory, " that Mameluke for all occasions," 
dated Reims, i4tli March, 1814, he remarks : 
" In this document -wejiiid only evidences of 

a DREARY DESPOTISM." 

Again, same month, when Buonaparte 
lays open the effects of that " dreary des- 
potism " to Sebastiani, a Corsican like him- 
self, " the General remained astounded, ad- 
miring his coolness and profundity of 
thought, and asking himself, how genius so 
vast had not prevented the cotntnisston of 
errors so flagranti 

Such quotations might be multiplied, 
but one allusion cannot be passed over 
without calling attention to it. Buona- 
parte is always talking about "Victory or 
death." In these articles the courage of 
the professional soldier upon a field of bat- 
tle has never been denied to Buonaparte. 
It was habit, which the sagacious Welling- 
ton had emphasized as far stronger than 
even natural character, and his, Buona- 
parte's belief in his star, which is Mahome- 
dan fatalism, but when beyond the bril- 
liancy of the lime-lights of the drama, in 
action, no human being was more careful 
of his personal safety than Buonaparte and 
the Buonapartes. Even his attempt at 
suicide at Fontainebleauis deemed apochra- 
phal by different historians, (some say it 
was epilepsy, others catalepsy), and while he 
was continually urging cold-bloodedly, his 
most devoted adherents into the abyss, he 
took the best of care not to take the irretrie- 
vable step himself. The spirit of his ex- 
hortations breathed the idea, as in his pro- 
clamation before Waterloo, that NOW was 
the time To do or die, but the moment 
that adversity called for some such supreme 
self-sacrifice, he made his escape. As again 
and again before indicated, that which his 
admirers styled the "Rock of Bronze," 
was in reality a mass of far more impres- 
sionable and ductile metal. 

Macdonald, to whom has been conceded 
the honor of the utmost loyalty to the last. 



in his "Memoires," makes some most dam- 
aging revelations, and the falsity of the 
portraits, physical, mental and moral, of 
Buonaparte is on a par with the material of 
the sarchophagus in which his remains 
were placed under the Domeof thelnvalides. 

Napoleon III, who was a gentleman in . 
his fidelity to his friends, and in that 
showed he was no Buonaparte any more 
than he had any blood of the race in his 
veins. He believed that he had obtained 
at an immense price, a sarchophagus of 
porphyry — for his presumed uncle — whereas 
mineralogy has revealed the fact — so Senior 
records — that it is simply a species of sand- 
stone. The receptacle is as much a deception 
as was the Buonaparte who lies within it. 
Was he not what the German writers de- 
clared him to be, a Popans. 

Although, according to popular opinion, 
Thiers says nothing but what is eulogistic 
of Napoleon, people who flatter themselves 
they read if they would only read closely 
and if they would only read carefully 
between the lines, it would soon appear 
that even "mendacious Thiers" utters 
many opinions which amount to the se- 
verest condemnation of Buonaparte. In 
the English translation of his " History of 
the Consulate and Empire," Vol. 17, Book 
LIII, conclusion, he says (449): "This 
man, at that time [1803] so admirable, was, 
by the very fact of possessing absolute 
power, on the brink of an abyss." "Alas, 
he descended from this glorious eminence 
to listen to pamphleteers, and abandoned 
himself to bursts of passion as violent as 
unworthy of him. " 

This corroborates Chaptal as to his fren- 
zied bursts of passion (450) : "The prudent 
Consul had become suddenly a madman." 
This refers, among other freaks of insanity, 
to his murder of the Duke d'Enghien. 
Then Thiers goes on to enumerate his fatal 
mistakes (454). One was "making war 
with England interminable;" (462), an- 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



47 



other the fatal Spanish war. (466), Then 
Thiers notes a single example "of the pro- 
gress of meanness under despotic rule ;" 
(467), he imputes his misfortunes to his 
"frenzied will ;" (472 j, he cites as his first 
great fault his "insulting the Ambassador 
of Great Britain ;" as his second great fault 
his pretensions to "obtaining universal 
empire," a madly acquisitive policy ; (474), 
third the Russian Alliance in 1807, "a 
policy must either be false or a crime against 
Europe ;" the fourth was his infamous con- 
duct towards and in Spain ; (475), his fifth 
great fault was his Invasion of Russia in 
1812 ; (476), his sixth and last great fault 
" was his refusing the conditions of Prague, 
in 1813." 

As to the Waterloo campaign let Thiers 
and all his confreres vapor as they will in 
his whole conduct during "The hundred 
days, he was more insane than he ever 
had been before, and so far from displaying 
any common sense, any true generalship, 
it was a series of more weaknesses {defail- 
lances touseMichelet's word) shortcomings, 
absolute want of ordinary energetic saga- 
city and more hideous wanton sacrifices of 
hetacombs of brave men, making dice, as 
Byron styles it, of human bones, like the 
desperate ventures of a reckless gambler, 
than was ever displayed by any despotic 
military chief in the same number of days. 
That through physical influences he was no 
longer fifty in the hundred of his former 
brain powers, as Chaptal declares, is un- 
doubtedly true, but that he possessed at 
any time the hundred Cliaptal is willing to 
concede, justice and truth emphatically de- 
clare to be utterly erroneous. He was the 
most overestimated specimen of a creature 
of accident or fate who ever was able to ac- 
complish so much evil that some good — 
not his intention, far from it — might be 
evolved or enjoyed the same opportunities 
of benefitting humanity. He was an Ap- 
polyon and an Abaddon in the guise of man. 



Oh, Ate ! Oh, Dice ! Oh, Nemesis ! Oh, 
ye Eumenides (Erinnys) ! you never pur- 
sued any of your victinis with more im- 
placable retribution than you poured it 
with icy vehemence upon Napoleonedi Buo- 
naparte. No porphyry sarcophagus — by 
the way, it is said the porphyry is but a 
fraud — no Dome of the Invalides can 
compensate for the tortures of the fall 
from such a throne as you filled, for the 
loss of such a sceptre as you wielded. 
You will find your place with the Neros, 
the Borgias, the Attilas, " the Scourges of 
God,'' when the film falls from the eyes of 
historic judgment and you are weighed in 
the scales of Belshazzar and Amenti. 

In conclusion, listen to the words of 
Erckmann-Chatrian : "Our unhappy coun- 
try is cast down very low ! When Napo- 
leon took possession of France she was 
the most grand, the most free, the most 
powerful of the nations ; all other peoples 
admired us and envied us ! * * * To- 
day [after Waterloo] we are conquered, 
ruined, bled to exhaustion ; the enemy 
holds our fortresses, he plants his foot upon 
our throat. * * * That which had never 
before been seen since France existed— the 
stranger master in our capital ! This we have 
witnessed twice within two years ! [Under 
Napoleon III again in 1871]. Behold what 
it costs to place a nation's liberty, its for- 
tune, its honor, in the hands of an ambi- 
tious mortal." 

To wind up there are two sentences preg- 
nant with truth and food for reflection. One 
comprises the last words of Bondois in his 
" Napoleon and the Society of His Time," 
" « people [alluding particularly to the 
French servile submission to Buonaparte] 
have sitnply the government which they 
merit. The second is : ''''There was nothing 
natural about Buonaparte but his selfish- 
ness.'''' " No one can study," says Forsyth, 
"the character of Napoleon without being 
struck by one prevailing feature — his intense 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



selfishness,'''' and "another feature," which 
must not be lost sight of, " /zw habitual dis- 
regard of tj'iith. ' ' * 

This ends for the present these revela- 
tions of the true character of Napoleon. 
Notes in regard to others have been col- 
lected, which, if developed and digested, 
would fill a large volume. During the last 
fifteen months sorrows and sufferings have 
accumulated upon the writer, and during 
the preparation and comparison of the 
proofs of the last article, which appeared 
in the March number of the COLLEGE Stu- 
dent, the writer was subjected to the 

* " He, Wellington, said he had several of the ad- 
vantages possessed by Bonaparte, in regard to his 
freedom of action and power of risking, without being 
constantly called to account. Bonaparte was quite 
free from all inquiry, and that he himself was in fact 
very much so. The other advantages which Bona- 
parte possessed, and of which he made so much use" 
Lord Wellington said, " was his full latitude of i,y\tsq, 
that, if so disposed" he said, "he [Wellington] could 
not do." Page 227, Larpent's Diary. 



most violent pains that assail the male por- 
tion of humanity, and for about two months 
held him captive to the debility and com- 
plications consequent on the difficulty itself, 
and the only remedies which brought tem- 
porary surcease of pain. The last article 
has been finished in intervals of convales- 
cence, and if physical strength is not going 
to be restored literary labor must cease 
with the 76th birthday. This is greatly to 
be regretted, for it was the only real relief. 
Moreover, the connection with Franklin 
and Marshall College, its professors and 
students, for many years, through the COL- 
LEGE Student, has been a source of ex- 
treme pleasure, and if it ceases with this 
number the writer can only conclude with 
his best wishes for the prosperity of the in- 
stitution and the happiness of its students, 
in fact, of all with whom he has been so 
pleasantly and profitably brought in con- 
tact. 



ADDENDUM, 



The following note, by some oversight, was omitted from the body of the pamphlet, 
and is here reproduced. 



Powder Magazine. — Such was already the reputa- 
tion of Chaptal as a chemist that in 1790 he was 
ordered to Paris by Robespierre to organize the fa- 
mous Powder Magazine of Greuelle, as the majority of 
the fourteen armies organized by Carnot was paralj'zed 
by a want of powder. Chaptal was held accountable 
upon his personal responsibility that within a month 
powder should be forthcoming, so that the campaign 
could open. It was a hard position wherein to be 
placed. It was powder or his head. 

GreneUe was established with the ability to turn out 
daily eight milliers (So cwt. ?) of powder. The area 
within the walls was based upon that calculation. The 
buildings were located so far apart that if one caught 
fire, the nearest would not be endangered. The opera- 
tions of themselves inspired no apprehension, but 
when the estimated maximum was reached of 80 cwt. a 
da}' the Committee of Public Safety, under the pressure 
of necessity, exacted an augmentation of double. 
Chaptal did his best to explain that the establishment 
was not calculated for that amount, but that everything 
was based upon the idea of turning out 80 cwt., and 
that in placing additional buildings between those that 
existed there would no longer he sufficient interspaces 
nor any guarantee against a general explosion. His ob- 
servations were futile. He received his orders and had to 
obey. When he had reached the fabrication of 160 
cwt. a day the committee ordered him to increase it to 
320 cwt. He urged a repetition of his warnings with- 
out receiving the slightest attention on the part of his 
superiors. Thenceforward chaos reigned. There was 
no longer any order ; there was insufficient supervi- 
sion ; accidents became inevitable. A thousand to 
1,200 mechanics of all trades were mingled with 2,500 
powder-makers. Vehicles loaded with materials of 
every kind circulated everywhere upon paved roads, 
upon which the workmen impelled wheelbarrows or 
rolled barrels full of powder. Every minute the me- 
chanics were caught smoking their pipes. All this 
portended an inevitable catastrophe, which did occur, 
and it seemed a miracle that eight months elapsed be- 
fore the cataclysm. 

The explosion at Grenelle ignited 6,500 cwt. of pow- 
der in barrels in process of fabrication ; 550 men per- 
ished and about an equal number died in the hospital. 
Two military detachments, together 50 men, simply 
disappeared ; 60 horses were consumed ; 100 mechanics. 
Of three large vehicles, each with five horses, one 
loaded with beams and two others with stones, not a 
trace remained. A heavy iron axletree, twisted into a 



spiral, was found in the centre of the Champ-de-Mars, 
to which some fragments of the nave of the wheels were 
still attached. Moreover, what was unsusceptible of 
explication was the total disappearance of all the men 
and animals without leaving the slightest trace. Walk- 
ing over the whole area an hour after the explosion 
Chaptal could only find two or three human thighs or 
arms and not a vestige of a horse ; 1,217 human beings 
altogether perished. Chaptal escaped the explosion 
because, for the first time in four months, he happened 
to be absent that day. He only saved Ais head because 
Robespierre opportunely lost kis head, since Chaptal 
was accused of having been the cause of the catastro- 
phe which he had so often predicted and had striven to 
avert. 

The relative position of the Powder Magazine on the 
plain of Grenelle to the city of Paris and distance from 
the thickly settled portion is now difficult to determine. 
The locality known as Grenelle is now within the for- 
tifications to the southwest of the city of the XVIII 
century, about three miles from the Louvre. It may 
not be generally known that when in 1814 the Allies 
had entered Paris it was charged against Napoleon 
that, in one of his frenzies of fury, he sent orders to 
the officer in charge to blow up the enormous quanti- 
ties of powder stored there, which would have occa- 
sioned great loss of life and immense destruction of 
property. Whether this accusation is true or false it 
has been again and again asserted and denied, and the 
truth of it can never be decided, if lies are set off 
against truths ; but such an act would not be inconsist- 
ent with his character, considering that had it not been 
for his marshals he would have led his army against 
Paris and distinctly held out to his troops the plunder 
of the capital as the reward of their success. 

What follows seems incontrovertible proof that Buo- 
naparte did send such an order : 

" The CAPITU1..AT10N OF Paris." — "The marshals 
[Marmont and Mortier] had already agreed to surren- 
der the capital, but the capitulation was not yet signed 
when Napoleon arrived at the village of Juvisy, at the 
distance of ten miles from Paris. * * On returning 
from Vitry he became at length convinced of the true 
direction of the Allies. * * At Dalancourt, on the 
Aube, he received a report of the passage of the Allies 
at Meaux, and that Marmont and Mortier despaired of 
being able to make head against them. In this ex- 
tremity Napoleon had recourse to his father-in-law, 
[Francis I, Emperor of Austria, who was not with 
the other sovereigns at Paris,] and sent him a let- 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



ter, the contents of which have never been made 
public. At the same time he dispatched a General- 
aide-de-camp to Paris, with an order to hold out till 
his arrival, and with the lying assertion of his hav- 
ing entered into negotiations with Austria, and of 
the speedy conclusion of a separate peace with that 
power. Close after him he sent General Girardin to 
excite the troops and the inhabitants to prolong the 
defence, and verbally ordered the Powder Magazine , 
on the plai7i of Grenelle, to be blown up. Had this 
■>nurderous order been carried into execution, the de- 
struction of an incalculable number of the inhabitants 
must have been the consequence; but the officer in 
charge of the powder, Colonel Lescaor, demanded a 



written order, which General Girardin had not to give 
him. At the present day, when the so-called ' Young 
Literature ' is accustomed to lavish eulogy on Na- 
poleon, and to represent that scourge of humanity as 
a model of goodness, his panegyrists affect to doubt 
the truth of this fact ; yet at the time we are speaking 
of, IT WAS WELL KNOWN TO ALL PARIS, and the par- 
ticulars were learned by many of us from Colonel 
Lescaur himself, zvho was rewarded by the Emperor 
Alexander with the Diamond Cross of the Order of 
St. Anne, of the second class." Pages 377-378, " His- 
tory of the Campaign in France in 1814," by General 
A. Mikhailofsky-Danilefsky, 8vo, London, 1839. 




Aftei' a Photograph, frc 



David's Portrait in the Gallery at Versailles ; 
[isiciered best likeness of 



Napoleone di Buonaparte. 



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